Itunes: changing library from external drive to My Cloud query

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I have a query about how best to change the location of my music from an external drive (J:) to My Cloud using iTunes without losing my historical playcounts and playlists.

Looking around after having started, I don’t think I have opted for the best way…

…but what I have done is to copy the contents of my external drive into the shared music share of the cloud exactly as they are.

I was then going to change the location of the media folder (J:) to the My Cloud, assigning the share a letter and making it remount on booting up.

Where I expect I will fail is with the .xml and .itl library files. These files are not in the external (J:) drive, but are on the PC’s hard drive under C:\Users\Marc\Music\iTunes

Does that matter? Can they be linked up again?

 Would doing it this work - would itunes be fooled by my switching of drives in this way?

Or should I go down the route of organising my library via that choice on iTunes?

2

Hello,

I have never tried this. Lets see what other users can comment on this.

Also take a look at this link to see if it helps.

iTunes server and how it works on a WD Network drive 

3

When you move the media folder (from J: in your case) to let’s say M: (then new mapped drive on myCloud) then go into itunes program and tell it the new location of your media.  This should update the library info stored (in your case in C:\Users\Marc\Music\iTunes) to reflect accoridingly.  I too, keep my itunes library folder separate from my itunes media folder and this has always worked for me.

Go to Preferences>Advanced>itunes media folder location and click change.

4

You should consider moving your entire library to the NAS, including the library files. 

See for example:  https://discussions.apple.com/message/20898441#20898441

I found this post very useful on how to organize all the files and directoris so that the library is self contained:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4817382

At this point, I have all the files on the NAS, will offline copies in Windows 8 and 7 for the itl and xml files for faster access.

You can have multiple computers pointing at the same library but be careful that only one would modify the files at the same time.

5

Certainly a few things to think about there. Thanks for the pointers!