external-diskimacitunesmusic
I have an iMac running OS X Yosemite 10.10.5, with iTunes 12.3. I want to transfer my music to an external hard drive, but here is the difference:
I don't want to transfer it to another computer. I want all my music on my iMac referenced on my iMac, but located in my external hard drive. That means, if I eject my drive, I can't hear the music because it's not on my iMac. I would still want the possibility to see my list of songs in the iTunes program.
Yes it is, if you've set up the iTunes libraries for home sharing. Turn on iTunes on the machine with all the music. Go to iTunes on the machine you want the music on, then open look for other iTunes libraries on the network. If you don't see share libraries you may need to update the menu options in the General settings. Browse to the songs you want highlight them then click import in the bottom of the iTunes window.
I use this all the time to move songs, movies, TV Shows between my main desktop with a few TB's of storage and the different laptops around the house. This also works between OS X and Windows environments since it's connecting with iTunes.
EDIT: You can also configure the main iTunes library to automatically sync songs from the other libraries. This would mean that you only need to hook up a monitor once to set up the share the first time. You could also use this time to set up a VNC client on the main machine from which you could access the computer with your laptops and make edits as needed.
Backing up your purchases is one approach. Since iTunes provides access to your prior purchases (as long as they have not been removed by Apple or the Developer), you can safely delete them from your computer. That won't be enough though. You'll need to tell iTunes not to automatically download them. Here are the steps you could take:
Best Answer
This is is how I have iTunes set up. Just go to iTunes->Preferences->Advanced and change the iTunes Media Folder location to the external disk. The iTunes library file will remain in ~/Music/iTunes and so you ca browse the titles and other metadata,
The one thing that I have found you need to be careful of is if the external disk is not mounted then don't add Podcasts or do much with ITunes as the program will reset the directory path if it can't find the external direve. However the paths to the music files will not be altered so it is only a long term issue,