iTunes For Mac: The Quickest Way To Move Your iTunes Music Folder To An External Hard Drive

I got an external hard drive to use as a dedicated store for my iTunes library. Strangely enough when I tried to move my iTunes music folder location to the external drive with the “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” under Advanced settings, and the “Consolidate Library…” under File -> Library, nothing happened.

I double checked the process to do this against Apple’s support knowledge base article, but my music files stayed exactly where they were previously on my MacBook’s main disk.

I then figured that maybe I can trick iTunes into thinking it is accessing a local folder. So how do we do this? Well just create a folder alias: Click the music folder on your external hard drive and hold down the mouse button. Then, while holding down the Command (Apple key) and Option (alt) keys simultaneously, drag the folder alias to where you want it to appear (I placed mine on the main Finder menu, next to the original Music folder on OS X), and let go of the mouse button. Instead of moving the original item, this will create an alias at the new location. Preferably you’d want to rename it to something other than Music, so you can easily differentiate it from the original Music folder on Mac. I called mine MusicExt.

Now just go to the Advanced Preference; change the iTunes music folder location to the alias folder and then Consolidate your Library. iTunes will then display a dialog, showing the files being moved to their new location.