Help with settings of my Music from an external drive.

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Level 2

268 points

Help with settings of my Music from an external drive.

I have 1.6tb of music. It is currently stored on the drive of my iMac M1 with 2tb of storage. My computer is now basically full. I would like to be able to play my music from the external drive: however if I download new music, I would like that music to be stored on the iMac. This way, over time, I can take what is stored on the iMac, and add it to the external drive and then delete it from the iMac. Is this possible, or will anything I download and play go on to the external drive? Do to the size of my library, I keep several external drives of my library, and also have a 5tb time machine. Thanks for any help in advance.

Posted on Dec 19, 2025 9:00 AM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

427,205 points

Dec 19, 2025 9:21 AM in response to Lilisbuddy

It you let Music manage your library it is best to keep ti all in one place, but it on the internal or external drives.

If you manually manage your music you can put each track where you like, but it obviously gets confusing if you keep it all over the place.

I keep all my music on an external drive. I also happen to manage it manually, but that's personal preference. I also have a few tracks I only listed to once every 5 years and prefer to store archived on a different drive that I rarely attach to my computer. Those tracks I don't even add to Music and I use a third party player to play those when I want to listen to them.

This article discusses some options: Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

278,167 points

Dec 19, 2025 9:57 AM in response to Lilisbuddy

I would advise against splitting the library across both internal and external drives, or moving content from one drive to another once it has been added to your Music library. Doing so complicates backup, restoring, or migrating your library to a different drive in future. I'd suggest a dedicated external drive for your library with sufficient room for expansion. For a typical Music library it should be possible to move/copy the folder ~/Music/Music to the root of your external drive, e.g. as <External>/Music, then option-start-Music and select the library at <External>/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary. To ensure that the library is not dependent on content on the internal drive you can confirm that the media folder has reset to <External>/Music/Media, via Music > Settings|Preferences > Files, then use File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files. Cleaning the old content from the internal drive is a manual task once you have checked all is working properly, and ideally backed up again from the new location.

See also Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community.

tt2

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