You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Deleting old music library

So, I seem to have done things a bit bass ackwards in transferring my iTunes files to the new PC. I thought I had moved my Library on the old PC to a separate drive to enable me to simply transfer the drive to the new machine. I must have got that wrong somehow as I had to rebuild the library from scratch, but I figured that now all was OK. Wrong!


iTunes still determined to swap my library back to the C: drive every time I restarted. Further digging and I found an old discussion thread from 2019 which went into much greater detail about making a split library portable.


So following those instructions (thank you to turingtest2 if you are still here, very useful), I rebuilt the library structure, and then copied the necessary files to the new library - Success! However, I now have 3 copies of my music, one on the C: drive (no longer necessary), one on a dedicated 2nd drive (actual library ) and a backup on an external drive.


So, finally the question, can I simply delete the itunes folder C:\Users\MyName\Music\iTunes, as it is no longer required, or do I need to keep it for 'reasons'? Normally I would have just deleted it and seen what happened as it doesn't seem to have anything useful in there, but I'm paranoid around this now and really don't want to have to rebuild the library again.

Windows, Windows 10

Posted on Apr 12, 2021 11:38 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Apr 16, 2021 4:31 AM

Hi Andy,


When you open and close iTunes you can check that it is the copy of the iTunes Library.itl file on the external drive that gets updated. If you want to run additional tests rename the folder on the C: drive as NOT iTunes. Assuming nothing breaks in the library then it will be safe to delete NOT iTunes.


tt2

Similar questions

1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Apr 16, 2021 4:31 AM in response to Andythebatch

Hi Andy,


When you open and close iTunes you can check that it is the copy of the iTunes Library.itl file on the external drive that gets updated. If you want to run additional tests rename the folder on the C: drive as NOT iTunes. Assuming nothing breaks in the library then it will be safe to delete NOT iTunes.


tt2

Deleting old music library

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.