iTunes is a music software innovation that was quite impressive when it was first released back in 2001. It was way ahead of all the competitors and it definitely turns heads with its great user interfaces. It was developed by Bill Kincaid and released by Casady & Greene in 1998 as SoundJam MP. It was later purchased by Apple and branded under the new name of iTunes. Unfortunately, there seems to be little advances in recent years.
Here is a problem I’m trying to solve. I like to keep my music library in an external drive in my home network. As music library is getting larger and to make it more portable, it is a good idea to keep the music library in one place and all your devices can stream from the same music library.
But, I searched through all the menu options in iTunes, and there is no option to open another iTunes library or change the library location 🙁
So after a bit of research, I did find a way to open a different music library, it is like the undocumented feature that everyone just need to know. So here is the instruction:
- Please make sure that iTunes is not running.
- Hold down the [Shift] key for windows or the [Option] key for Mac, and open iTunes at the same time.
- You will see a pop up window allowing you to choose or create a library, example here is from a windows system.
And now you are free to choose or create a library in any of your network hard drive.
Have fun with your music library 🙂