Moving my iTunes Library

I just arrived home for the summer, and I decided now that I’m home with not much to do for a little while, I’d finally free up some space and move my iTunes library to an external hard drive. I figure, since I never play music from my laptop when I’m on the movie, due to owning an iPod, I don’t really have a good reason for keeping everything on my internal hard drive. And if you ever read my IBoughtAMac article, I’m sure you can imagine just how much space my library was taking on my laptop. Basically I didn’t have any space left.
So I bought a new external 320gb from Maxtor. First of all, it’s actually only 300gb(or 297…), even after formatting it correctly… I don’t know why they don’t just advertise it as that. But either way, I’ve now got plenty of space.
Now let me tell you what I’ve learned, a day after trying to move everything. It’s not as straight forward as you might thing, but I found the best way to do it!

1) Copy your folder iTunes Music to your new hard drive. Don’t change anything at all. Just make a straight up copy.
2) Go to iTunes>Preferences. Make sure iTunes is keeping everything organized already, then Change the directory it writes to. Pick where you just moved your iTunes Music folder.
3) Go to Advanced> Consolidate Library

It’s the third step I wish I’d known about before starting this whole endeavour. Your music won’t find it’s new home until you do this consolidation, so just hit that button before you start playing with any of your music, and you should be all set.