Topic: iTunes Library on External Hard Drive

[F3RL]

Anyone with networked or shared hard drive over the network can have their iTunes library removed from their computers.

I recently noticed that my D:\ drive, multimedia drive, is running out of its space due to 97GB of music, 430GB of movies, 21GB of photos and 60GB of software. So I decided to use D-Link DI-624S (with external hdd) as my iTunes library, also allowing other computers on my network can listen or copy all the music that is on that external hard drive – I will show you how.

I will skip several steps, users with bit of computer knowledge should know how.

1.   Map your network drive with all the music on it, mine is X:\ (My Y:\ and Z:\ drives are mapped for data backup). Yours can be different, up to you. But avoid range between C:\ to H:\ just in case system needs it. On Mac it’s different there is no drive letter, just matter of mapping them on the desktop.
2.   Copy iTunes folder from My Music to the external hdd. Open iTunes with ‘shift’ key pressed. It will ask you to choose the iTunes library file. Browse through the external hdd and allocate it. So mine looks like; ‘Z:\libMusic\iTunes’.
3.   Drag music files from external hdd to iTunes library window, it will take a long time, it took me 4 days to completely get album artwork, gapless playback etc… I got my QoS Max speed set to 1MB/s that’s why.
4.   After iTunes has done what it needs to do. You are on your way to go.

Advantage over this:
a.   saves your hard drive space
b.   other people on network can access without having duplicates
c.   all managed by itunes

Disadvantages over this:
a.   time consuming (only on first time)
b.   slow networking device cause lags while playing music

Personal opinion:
a.   love it, frees up my hdd by 100GB
b.   lag-less playback of music, also movies play well too
c.   when downloaded or ripped new music, it takes a while to transfer (downside)

I know it’s a crap manual but I was busy doing something else;
Please understand any grammatical errors as I’m not a native English speaker.

Hope you find this useful.

P.S. Found a useful and, even more detailed instructions here:
http://lifehacker.com/230605/hack-attack-share-your-itunes-music-library-over-your-home-network

Eric.