Laptop Cleanup - Question about iTunes music

ledvedderman

Okay, I should lead off with the fact that I am not the most knowledgable when it comes to tech issues. I do a lot of recording at home and run it through my Mac which is about 5 years old. It's clearly running out of room because the poor thing can't really keep up when I am recording and playing back. 
I have a lot of music on this laptop, but I'm starting to think that most of the albums are on here twice. First as the original download and then again under my iTunes media? Is that how that works? All along I thought it just moved the music from the original download to the iTunes, not just copied and pasted! On top of THAT, I also have the original .rar or .zip files that I downloaded for the album. 
I am looking to move all of my music to listen to to an external hard drive so that when I'm recording there would be so much more available space on the laptop. In theory, if I got an external and just copy and pasted everything in the iTunes>iTunes Media>Music folder...IN THEORY...that should move everything over, right?

HesCalledDyer

In theory it should.  I would recommend moving things in small batches though instead of all at once.  Back in 2015 I tried to move my entire library at once from my old iMac to my new one and a bunch of random individual songs got corrupted.  I don't know which ones they are until I happen to play them, and I am still discovering some almost 4 yrs later.  The way I know they're corrupted is they all stop playing at 2:41.  It's weird.  As I've discovered them, I've gone back and moved the original files from my old computer again to the new one, replacing the existing corrupt file on the new iMac.  Everything seems to work fine after that.  I don't know if it was the extreme amount of data being copied over at once or what, but that's the only reason I can think, so definitely go in smaller batches. That one large transfer totally maxed out my resources for a long period of time, so I think that is likely the culprit.  And if your computer is already having performance slowdowns, you might be affected similarly.  And delete those .rar and .zip files while you're at it.

Also, have you maxed out the RAM on it?  If not, that may be something you want to look into as well.

Meltdown99

ledvedderman said:

Okay, I should lead off with the fact that I am not the most knowledgable when it comes to tech issues. I do a lot of recording at home and run it through my Mac which is about 5 years old. It's clearly running out of room because the poor thing can't really keep up when I am recording and playing back. 
I have a lot of music on this laptop, but I'm starting to think that most of the albums are on here twice. First as the original download and then again under my iTunes media? Is that how that works? All along I thought it just moved the music from the original download to the iTunes, not just copied and pasted! On top of THAT, I also have the original .rar or .zip files that I downloaded for the album. 
I am looking to move all of my music to listen to to an external hard drive so that when I'm recording there would be so much more available space on the laptop. In theory, if I got an external and just copy and pasted everything in the iTunes>iTunes Media>Music folder...IN THEORY...that should move everything over, right?

My 1st suggestion is before you starting deleting files would for you to go to the finder and click on it, then click on favourites and move your iTunes folder to an external hard drive...and go from there.  Apple is killing iTunes for a separate music app that will out in the fall.

ledvedderman

Thank you both very much. Both of those posts help me out quite a bit. Really appreciate it!

HesCalledDyer

Meltdown99 said:

ledvedderman said:

Okay, I should lead off with the fact that I am not the most knowledgable when it comes to tech issues. I do a lot of recording at home and run it through my Mac which is about 5 years old. It's clearly running out of room because the poor thing can't really keep up when I am recording and playing back. 
I have a lot of music on this laptop, but I'm starting to think that most of the albums are on here twice. First as the original download and then again under my iTunes media? Is that how that works? All along I thought it just moved the music from the original download to the iTunes, not just copied and pasted! On top of THAT, I also have the original .rar or .zip files that I downloaded for the album. 
I am looking to move all of my music to listen to to an external hard drive so that when I'm recording there would be so much more available space on the laptop. In theory, if I got an external and just copy and pasted everything in the iTunes>iTunes Media>Music folder...IN THEORY...that should move everything over, right?

My 1st suggestion is before you starting deleting files would for you to go to the finder and click on it, then click on favourites and move your iTunes folder to an external hard drive...and go from there.  Apple is killing iTunes for a separate music app that will out in the fall.

That is good to know.  Assuming that was announced at WWDC last week?  I haven't watched the keynote yet.  I will definitely need to back up my library beforehand, just in case.  Steve Jobs is dead.  Apple products unfortunately no longer behave like they did when he was alive.  Just another tech company now.

Meltdown99

HesCalledDyer said:

Meltdown99 said:

ledvedderman said:

Okay, I should lead off with the fact that I am not the most knowledgable when it comes to tech issues. I do a lot of recording at home and run it through my Mac which is about 5 years old. It's clearly running out of room because the poor thing can't really keep up when I am recording and playing back. 
I have a lot of music on this laptop, but I'm starting to think that most of the albums are on here twice. First as the original download and then again under my iTunes media? Is that how that works? All along I thought it just moved the music from the original download to the iTunes, not just copied and pasted! On top of THAT, I also have the original .rar or .zip files that I downloaded for the album. 
I am looking to move all of my music to listen to to an external hard drive so that when I'm recording there would be so much more available space on the laptop. In theory, if I got an external and just copy and pasted everything in the iTunes>iTunes Media>Music folder...IN THEORY...that should move everything over, right?

My 1st suggestion is before you starting deleting files would for you to go to the finder and click on it, then click on favourites and move your iTunes folder to an external hard drive...and go from there.  Apple is killing iTunes for a separate music app that will out in the fall.

That is good to know.  Assuming that was announced at WWDC last week?  I haven't watched the keynote yet.  I will definitely need to back up my library beforehand, just in case.  Steve Jobs is dead.  Apple products unfortunately no longer behave like they did when he was alive.  Just another tech company now.

It was announced at the WWDC.  I agree its not the same company without jobs.  I will live with lesser tech as long as they continue to stand by consumers who want some security in their devices.  

HesCalledDyer

ledvedderman said:

Thank you both very much. Both of those posts help me out quite a bit. Really appreciate it!

Absolutely!  Computer cleaning can be a bigger headache than cleaning the house after a kid's birthday party, so I completely understand being on the apprehensive. 

Meltdown99

ledvedderman said:

Thank you both very much. Both of those posts help me out quite a bit. Really appreciate it!

No problem.  Best it's important to keep backup of Music and Photos on external hard drives, just in case an update corrupts your computer.  Let us know how you make out. I only Apple everything...