Changing your network iTunes music library temporarily when importing

Sometimes it’s helpful to change the location of your iTunes music library.

For example, I currently use Amazon S3 to store my music through iTunes, but since it’s a network drive, it’s really slow when importing CD’s, or downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store.

The reason is because it has to upload at the same time it downloads. I’ve seen some strange things happen when I attempt to do this, so to be safe, I always change my iTunes music library to somewhere local before I try any of those tasks.

It’s just a temporary change, and it’s a breeze to change it back and forth, as long as you don’t get “tricked” by iTunes. In other words, be cautious of their suggestions.

Change the location

The first step is to open iTunes, and choose iTunes > Preferences. In the Advanced tab, you’ll see the current location of your iTunes music library.

iTunes Preferences Advanced tab

Click Change to specify a new location. If your library is normally a network drive (such as Amazon S3), you’ll want to change your library to somewhere local. This speeds up CD imports, and downloads from the iTunes Music Store.

Do not let iTunes update your library

Once you make your change, and click OK, you’ll be presented with this progress window, which says “Updating iTunes library…”:

It’s important to click Stop immediately. We don’t want to update the iTunes library. It’s fine the way it is. We’re just making this change temporarily. (Not to mention this takes a very long time for large libraries.)

It’s already organized, thanks

Once you hit Stop, you may be presented with another window, this time asking you, “Would you like iTunes to move and rename the files in your new iTunes Music folder to match the ‘Keep iTunes Music folder organized’ preference?”

Click No. Again - we’re not moving any files or making any big changes here - we’re just temporarily switching the library location.

Note: You’ll only see this dialog window if you have this setting checked under Preferences > Advanced:

Quit and re-launch

Once you do this, it’s always best to quit iTunes, and re-launch it. This is to ensure that any processes that need to be run on startup can be done.

Import new music to temporary location

Once you re-launch iTunes with the temporary library location set, you are now ready to import the new music from CD, or download songs from the iTunes Music Store.

Remember: these newly imported songs are being stored in your temporary library, which should be a local folder. We’re not going to keep them there. We’re going to copy them to the real library momentarily.

Repeat the process

Once you finish importing your new music to your temporary library, point your library location back to it’s original spot, and repeat the process:

1. Change your library location.
2. Bypass any suggestions from iTunes.
3. Quit and re-launch.

Import new music to permanent location

Now you’re ready to import that same music to it’s permanent location.

In iTunes, choose File > Add to Library. Find the new music that you just imported on your local drive. Select that, and sit back and let iTunes upload to your permanent library location.

Related

We’ve discussed hosting your iTunes music library on Amazon S3 a short while ago.

Mac OS X Hints also has a post about making sure your iTunes network library doesn’t get reset.