DJing from external hard drive

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Luna · #1 Post by **Luna** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 8:49 pm

Hello! Please exuse me if there is already a thread on this topic, I had a little look and couldn't find one.

My laptop just died (boooooo) and it's going to be a while before I can afford a new one. I still want to keep DJing though, and was wondering if I can install a music program onto my external hard drive and DJ directly from that. This way I can DJ from my boyfriends mac with all my own playlists and music without clogging up his space.

Apparently the only way you can do this with iTunes is to delete certain folders and files from the internal hard drive, but this obviously won't work for me because he uses iTunes to DJ as well. Is there another program this might work with?

Hope that makes sense, my tech talk is less than satisfactory :D

Luna

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penguin · #2 Post by **penguin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 1:27 am

Jriver media center can be installed and run off an external hard drive (there's a special installation mode that let's you do this), however it's a Windows-only product. I'm not aware of any product for mac where this is a feature.

straycat · #3 Post by **straycat** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 2:31 am

Set up your own account on his machine and work from that, so you don't mess up his iTunes settings, then choose the a folder on the external as the main iTunes storage folder? (I think you can do this from the iTunes prefs)

Might work...

Rob · #4 Post by **Rob** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 4:57 am

What Straycat said.

You can set yourself up a seperate user profile on a mac by going to the little apple in the top left - system preferences - accounts (you might have to do the click lock to make changes / password thing first to allow you to add an account).

Log into your profile, open iTunes then go itunes - preferences - advanced then change the media folder location to your External HDD / OR untick the copy to media folder box and just drag and drop all your files into itunes and it should keep them linked back to the external HDD.

(If you do the second one and don't change the media folder if you put any new files on to iTunes they'll go to the default iTunes folder on the computer, not your HDD).

Simples.

trev · #5 Post by **trev** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 8:39 pm

What Rob said.

Luna · #6 Post by **Luna** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:48 am

Thanks guys, good solution.

I was hoping to find something I could plug straight back into my new laptop (old one is a write off) and not have to rebuild playlists etc manually, but beggars can't be choosers!

keither · #7 Post by **keither** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 7:49 am

Make sure you have a backup of your music, etc., if your external is your primary source. Portable external drives tend to take more abuse than regular drives, so they're more likely to fail.

(Of course, that's good advice in general.)

lipi · #8 Post by **lipi** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 6:37 pm

Luna wrote:Thanks guys, good solution.

I was hoping to find something I could plug straight back into my new laptop (old one is a write off) and not have to rebuild playlists etc manually, but beggars can't be choosers!
:D

Well, you won't have to rebuild anything. Just copy the library file to your new computer when you have it, and you're done.