Hi Alex, I would recommend opening up the Time Machine UI and copying your iTunes folder to another place on your hard drive. Time Machine backups can, I believe, be corrupted if you manually move or edit files in the Finder or anywhere else outside the Time Machine UI, not to mention file permission and symbolic linking issues.
That being said, if you have a valid iTunes Library that you want to point iTunes to, you can do so by holding down the OPTION key immediately after launching iTunes. You'll be given an opportunity to browse to the appropriate path and select the iTunes Library file, which will have a .itl extension. The good news is that anything in your iTunes Media folder will still be found by iTunes, as it respects relative paths. For example, on my Windows machine my iTunes Media folder was located at E:\iTunes\Itunes Media. When I switched to the Mac, I copied my entire iTunes library over to ~/Music/iTunes on the Mac, and all my media was found. If you have media outside of the iTunes Media folder, though, that won't be accessible unless you copy it over such that the the file paths are identical, or update all invalid paths manually using iTunes. Grant Sent from mobile On Oct 19, 2014, at 7:13 AM, Alex Hall <[email protected]> wrote: Hi all, I have a 64GB Macbook Air, so I don't have room for the music library I had on my 500GB Mac Mini. That library is still stored on my Time Machine backup drive, and I'd like to let iTunes access it from that drive (no, this is not a network-connected drive, just a USB one). The first question is: how do I do this? The second, stickier problem is that this library is on a backup drive, and all the files there seem to be locked. How would I let iTunes modify the database? Would I need to copy something to a writeable part of the drive? If so, what would I copy, exactly? Or, is there a way to make the TM backups writeable directly? Finally, since the whole thing is copied to an external drive, will the file paths in the old library still work? I spent a *lot* of time tagging tons of files with album, artist, and so on, and I really don't want to lose all that work. Plus, I'd just like access to my music again, and I want to really figure out iTunes12 so I can put up a guide to it. Thanks for any help. -- Have a great day, Alex Hall [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
