Moving your Music library to an external drive without losing playlists or play counts

If you have been collecting music since the iPod, the files are probably in ~/Music/Music/Media or ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media, and they can be tens of GB. The Music app lets you keep them on an external drive while the library, your playlists and play counts, stays on the Mac.

du -sh ~/Music/* ~/Music/*/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h | tail

Before you start

• Make sure Keep Music Media folder organised and Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library are on, in Music, Settings, Files. That way Music knows where every file is.
• Run File, Library, Organise Library and tick Consolidate files. This copies any songs stored elsewhere into the media folder, so nothing is left behind.
• Have a backup.

Moving it

1. Quit Music.
2. Copy the whole media folder, for example ~/Music/Music/Media, to the external drive.
3. Open Music, go to Settings, Files, click Change next to the media folder location, and choose the copy on the drive.
4. Play a few songs, including old ones, to check they are found.
5. Only then move the original media folder on the Mac to the Trash.

When the drive is not connected

Music shows an exclamation mark next to songs it cannot find. Plug the drive in and they come back. Do not choose to locate each file when asked, or you will point songs at the wrong place.

Other things in the Music folder

An old iTunes folder may hold previous library files, album artwork caches and even iPhone apps from years ago. The old iTunes folder covers what is safe to remove. Duplicate songs are covered in finding duplicate songs.