How to move your iTunes Library

James Clements — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:55:18 +0000

I'm personally not a big fan of iTunes but I recently noticed an issue where a couple of users had installed it and it had defaulted to saving their music library to their Home Directory. This usually wouldn't be an issue for most people but I redirect Home Directories to a share on a file server. In order to mitigate against what could have potentially been a requirement for additional disk storage I decided that advising users to change the location of their iTunes library from the default (which unknown to the users was a file server) to a local location on their computer was the best option. Here is a generalized version of the instructions I gave to network users.

1) Open iTunes and navigate through the menu to: Edit --> Preferences --> Advanced (tab)

2) Click the change button and change the folder location to something like D:\My Music (you will need to create this folder.) Click OK to close the screen.

3) Close iTunes altogether.

4) Copy your iTunes folder from C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\My Documents\My Music to D:\My Music.

5) Hold down the SHIFT key and click the iTunes shortcut.

6) Click on Choose Library (to point iTunes to the new library) and browse to D:\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl. Once you have selected the file iTunes Library.itl click Open.

7) Once you have opened iTunes using the library in the new location of D:\My Music\iTunes you can remove the old copy located in C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\My Documents\My Music.

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How to move your iTunes Library