Hi Keith,
Think of the listing in your music library in iTunes as shortcuts to the actual music files. It's sort of like having a shortcut to a file or program on your desktop, if you have Skype on your desktop, that file is not the actual Skype.exe application, but just a shortcut which points to Skype.exe. This means the actual music can be anywhere on your hard drive, an external hard drive or even a USB stick which of course would have to be plugged in to the computer. Your next step is to add the music to your library. You do this by clicking on "File" and "Add File to Library" or, if you want to add all the files in a folder, choose "Select Folder to Library". This opens a pretty standard Windows open dialogue, browse to the folder that contains your music, then tab to "Select" and press enter or space bar. Depending on how much is in that folder it can take a moment or even 30 or 40 seconds if you have thousands of songs, but you know when it's done because iTunes plays a tri-tone chime. What this process does is sort of create all these shortcuts in your music library, if you go to the music library tab in your source list and then tab over to the list view, you'll see all the songs and they will be named according to the ID3 tags from those files. If your files are not properly tagged, you may have a lot of Untitled listings. Keep in mind that if, for example, you have the song "Brother in Arms" by Dire Straights in a folder called "e:\music\Rock\Dire Straits\Brothers in Arms" where I just used the drive letter E as what an external drive may be, and if you then move that file to your local hard drive, for example to "c:\music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Dire Straights\Brothers in Arms" then if you try and play the file in iTunes it will not work and it will flag it as "Invalid location" because in your library it points to the file on your external drive. It's a good idea to decide how you want to set this up and to then do it once and keep it that way. There is no reason at all to move anything into the actual iTunes Media folder if you prefer to have it on an external drive. Of course keep in mind that if you use a laptop and you go somewhere, you will not be able to play y our music if your external drive is at home or if it is disconnected. Adding music to your music library does not copy anything, it just points to where it is. I have only a 120 Gig solid state drive in my laptop because I like the speed of the drive, but while I keep my 25 Gigs of music on the SSD, I have to keep my movies on my network attached drive because I don't have enough space on the SSD. If you sync music to your phone, it doesn't matter where the music is actually stored, as long as it is in your iTunes library and you either select to sync your entire library or select to sync selected genres, artists or albums and you then check which ones you want, it will sync to your iPhone which means it is actually copied to your iPhone and a physical copy is kept on your device. But one thing you can't do unless you jailbreak is copy music from your iPhone back to your computer. If you for some reason lost all your music on your computer because maybe your laptop is stolen and that is the only copy of the music you have, the music maybe on your phone, but you can't copy it from the phone back to a new computer. It's always a good idea to have redundant backups especially since you can buy a 500 Gig external USB hard drive for about $70 or so and a 1 Gig for $89 or $99. Hope this helped to make it clear how iTunes handles stuff. Good luck, Sieghard -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. To search the VIPhone public archive, visit http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en.
