Making external USB HDRIVE the active iTunes library and music source.

[Bkg]

I have an external USB HARD DRIVE which contains all the music I want to add to my iTunes as my music library. It is currently just a hard drive full of music and not designated as the designated library in iTunes.
I know I am to open iTunes by holding down the shift key first and make a choice of new library or use existing library but not sure how to proceed from there.
I definitely do not want to copy the music from the external hard drive to the Mac computer. There are many gigabytes of music on this external drive. I want to assign the external hard drive as my music library in iTunes and leave the external hard drive plugged in to the computer.

Thanks
BKG

 

[chas_m]

I have an external USB HARD DRIVE which contains all the music I want to add to my iTunes as my music library. It is currently just a hard drive full of music and not designated as the designated library in iTunes.

If you really mean "full," then this won't work. You'll need to find at least again as much space as the music is taking up in order to create a music library on there, since creating the library will take up as much space as the music does now (though you can delete the original files after you've added them to the new iTunes library.

I know I am to open iTunes by holding down the shift key first and make a choice of new library or use existing library but not sure how to proceed from there.

You mean option key, not shift. Being sure that you have enough space for a complete duplicate of all the music, once you've created the new empty iTunes library, and made sure that is now the default library, you can simply select all the music files on the drive and drag them onto the iTunes icon in the dock. This will duplicate them in the new iTunes library. Depending on how much music we're talking about, that could take a while. Once it's done, and you've checked to make sure the library is operating normally, you can then delete the "original" files from your drive.

Cheers,
Chas