here's my plan:

delete all 4,000+ songs from itunes player. go into itunes music folder, drag and drop that folder to my external hard drive. then go back into itunes and search for music to add on external hard drive. add music.

best route to go?

That should work fine.

You might also want to consider the iTunes library updater (free). You can choose locations where you store your music, run the library updater, and it will sync all the locations you specify on your hard drives with the iTunes library.

http://itlu.ownz.ch/wordpress/

It comes in really handy if you move around files, or change names or locations because you dont need to go into iTunes and remember everything that you changed. The library updater syncs everything for you.

Also, you should export/backup any playlists you want to save. Then once you have moved all your files to the other hard drive, you will have to open up your playlist in wordpad and do a mass replace to specify the correct file location.

For example, you're playlist will look something like this:

C:\mp3\Pearl Jam\Alive.mp3

But when you change hard drives, it will be a different drive and/or location, like maybe:

F:\music\Pearl Jam\Alive.mp3

So you'd need to replace all instances of "C:\mp3\" with "F:\music\" (or whatever the differences are in your case)

thank you.

since the original issue has been solved, i'm just gonna go and hijack this thread.

ok so i just recently got a new PC, and on my old PC i only had 7gb of HD, while my ipod was 20gig. so i had to delete all the copies of the mp3s from the PC, but i kept the info in the library. this worked fine.

So when i got my new pc, i figured just importing the librarylist it would work just fine....not...some error saying its missing the files....

The question really is, i just want to start from scratch again and delete everything from the ipod. what's the best way to go about this since i can't do it in Itunes?

Well, when I try and hook up my iPod to another computer and open up iTunes when it's connected, the iPod tries to sync with iTunes library. If the library is empty, it will also empty out the iPod.
So just make sure to set the iTunes/iPod to sync, and that should take care of it.

i'll try that, thanks

Buggy,

You seem to be the resident expert on this, so I'll ask you.

I want to move all of my music that I run on iTunes (it's stored in a folder on my c: drive) to a new external drive that I just got. This may be the same thing that CB wants to do.

I read your post above, and you seem to be suggesting that I run the updater. Will copying and pasting my iTunes' mp3s on my new external drive and then deleting the old files on the C: drive work (I want to free space on my C: drive)? I figure that I then have to go into iTunes and specify the new location on which iTunes should download music.

If I run the Updater and sync, is that the same as copying and pasting the files? Also, if I do that, I'm assuming that I still have to go into my C: drive and erase the old files, correct?

The part about your post that confuses me is your mention of my Playlists being deleted. If I do what I suggest, why would the Playlists be deleted?

Chris, go to the folder where your music is and copy everything to a new folder on the external. Then open iTunes, go to edit > preferences > advanced and point iTunes to the direction of the new folder.

Perfect. Thanks Mitch.