I have a Macbook and an external Seagate 500 GB hard drive. I used the hard drive and put the music on it from my old Compaq laptop. Now I want to use it with my Mac because I am getting rid of my Compaq. When I connect it to my Mac and play a song, it plays in iTunes and that is fine. However, when I right click on the song in iTunes and choose "Show In Finder", it just shows that song in finder rather than opening my external hard drive folder labeled "Music". My concern is that the song is being copied to my Mac hard drive rather than just being played off of my external hard drive. I tested this by ejected my external hard drive, opening iTunes, and playing the song. It plays the song. However if the song was playing directly off of the external hard drive, iTunes should give me an error message saying it can't find the location of the song. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have been using a Mac for less than a year so I am no expert. I have too many songs so I don't want them getting copied to my Mac hard drive. My goal is to get the Mac to play the songs directly off of my Seagate hard drives. Thanks for the help in advance.
I think this thread from a mac forum Might help. Mac Forum Although the person who created the thread is talking about movies, it should work the same.
Thanks a bunch man! I Googled it 100x and I didn't come across anything. Wrong word choices I guess. Thanks for the help.
Itunes may be making a copy of the song in the Itunes folder. You can change that in the Itunes preferences.
you can set your music folder up in the external HD to be your main itunes library. It's in Itunes prefrences.
Option + Click iTunes, and don't let go of Option until a new window pops up. Using this, you can select which iTunes library you wish to use. Send it to the library (targeting an iTunes Library file on your Seagate) on your external hard drive, and you're gravy.