How To Move Your Music Library to an External Drive on a Mac

A short video detailing how to move your Music to an External Drive on a Mac. I hope this helps, and please see the links below for my recommended External Hard Drives for Macs! Thanks!

My recommended fast and reliable external drives. Perfect for backups, audio, video production:

A great, well-made USB C Hub by Anker:

Note: Some of the links above are Amazon Associate links, which means I will earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you make a qualifying purchase. This helps support my channel and allows me to continue to create free content for you! Thanks for your support!

#mactutorials #creativemac #applemusic

[larryaugsburger]

This is the only tutorial that worked. No one else says to move the old media folder to the trash first, and that seems to have made the difference.

[Lionhearted]

Took me several minutes to follow these steps but it worked!!!! Thank you. Several tabs were kind of hidden like location was hiding the external drives in mine.

[mukrakrs]

terrific tutorial - clear concise and straightforward - thanks!

[Jeremyleivers]

One great option is to Open Music with Option Key:

Close the Music application if it’s open.
Hold down the Option key and click on the Music app to open it.
A dialog will appear asking you to choose or create a library.
Click on Choose Library... and navigate to the Music Library.musiclibrary file in your ~/Music/Music/ directory.
Select and Open: Select the library file and click Open.

[adrienneday]

Thanks for the video. I have so much music to to move to the hard drive and this was very informative! Ive been bumbling around until I found this.

[samiayoub]

Thank you so much for this perfectly explained procedure.
You just saved 350 GB on my 1TB SSD internal HD!

[shortstuff]

Very helpful and straight to the point. Thank you, this will help once I received my new mac with a much smaller hard drive than my current computer.

[WTHREET]

Excellent video. short and to the point but very throw. Thank You very well done!!!!

[quietstormkel]

Thank you so much! This makes it so much easier for me now. Now I have more room now

[tomgianelli]

Great video! Will all of the play-counts, ratings and playlists be transferred to the new library? TIA

[marygangemi]

Thanks for getting back to me. I thought my music would still be accessible on my computer without plugging in the hard drive. Can what i did be undone?

[marygangemi]

Yes I emptied the trash. When you say move them back to the disc, what disc?

[theedgeofbreakup]

Ok I was able to drag a cd to the right folder finally but it goes to the end of my alphabetical list after Z. I’ll change the location back to my Mac to see if that makes a difference and switch back when I’m done.

[thewordman]

This video was a great help, thank you. The only thing that slowed me down doing this was finding the right folder. Mine was labeled iTunes Media.

[ajhplays]

Its worked great thank you for the help. However it hasn't organised the music into the original playlists I have made on the iTunes application. is there a way to do this please?

[DoggyDawg]

thanx a lot, u saved me a lot of GBs, i was like why my mac looks full....

[JohnGalt]

Will my library play on a different Mac if plug in my hard drive into it?

[sophiemeyers]

If I do this will songs I add/delete to my library also add/delete to the hard drive automatically? Say if I want to save all my music to an external hard drive but then delete it from my laptop. Would the music stay on the hard drive?

[Therealdonknots]

Great video thank you, what I would like to do is keep my music on my current laptop and transfer the files to the external hard drive for safe keeping how can that be done?

[peterkellogg]

How do you play the music that is now on your hard drive?