Music can take up to a half of your Mac’s hard disk space. And if you recently faced the problem of low disc space, then what about transferring all the music to an external storage? By transferring media content to Hard disk drive you not only clean up some space. Sharing your music with friends and family becomes as easy as 123. To keep your music with you you know longer need to take a MacBook with you. The Core Audio feature allows to play music from an audio card with smallest delays technologically possible.
To be or not to be
You may think that there are no reasons to transfer content to an external storage device and this doesn’t make any sense. This is true but only till that moment when you realize that there is no free space on your computer. The problem with lack of space is a well-known one to MacBook users because most of them have only 128GB to 256GB of storage space.
Dos and Don’ts Of Data Transfer Process
There at least a few ways to transfer all the music from Mac to an external HDD. But we want to warn you about the pitfalls of that process. Don’t just transfer all the music you have to another subfolder on the HDD, this will break your entire experience when you open your iTunes for the next time. To transfer everything right you need to transfer iTunes library first. This is essential to keep all the shortcuts working.
What You Should Know About Transferring Media Files
All the music that you copied to a dedicated folder is still on your Mac. This means that you have created lots of duplicates. In order to solve this problem you may use some of the solutions described in this article – https://www.macpaw.com/how-to/duplicate-music-remover.
Simply deleting all those files can be a solution too, but we don’t recommend going the hard way. The second point is that only your files are transferred to the external storage, but your database is still stored on your computer. If you want to use the same playlists on two or more Macs, than you need to transfer the database as well.
How do you properly transfer the database to an external HDD?
To change the location of your database so that no paths and shortcuts to your files get broken, you need to stop interacting with iTunes and close it. Then go to the Music folder and copy the iTunes folder to a flash drive or other type of external storage. Then launch iTunes once again while holding Option and wait till you’re asked if you want to create a new database or pick the folder where the existing database is stored. Choose the second option and show iTunes where your old database is located. That’s how you can use one database for more than one Mac.
There are many advantages of such approach. First, you can always use your playlists on any device. You can use your friend’s Mac and work with your library in a manner you used to work with it on your computer. We can’t finish this article without giving a few disadvantages of keeping your media files on an external HDD. Probably the biggest disadvantage is that you store all the data on a physical hard drive and without having a backup, “say” in iCloud or Dropbox there’s a chance you’ll lose everything if your HDD is lost or stolen. That is what you should consider before moving your songs away from your Mac.
