Can you move apple music to a remote or external drive?

The Apple Music app must remain on the internal drive. Your music library, however, can be moved to an external drive.

I have mine on an external drive and works perfectly fine.

With the music app closed entirely, you need to move the entire Music Folder in the Media folder in your user profile out to the external drive. Then open the library in the Music app by holding down the option key before starting the Music app, then navigating to the new location of the music library and selecting the "Music Library.musiclibrary" file there.

If your library is not consolidated and has media in different folders on your Mac you will need to consolidate it first.

click here ➜ Make a split library portable - Apple Community

Once consolidated, it can be relocated and opened as above.

click here ➜ Move your iTunes library to a new computer - Apple Community

Stop just short of copying the library onto a new computer and your library will then reside and work from the external drive.

See Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community for some additional advice. A process which should work reliably is to copy the folder containing your active .musiclibrary package (normally ~/Music/Music) into the top of your external drive, then option-start-Music and choose this library in its new location, e.g. <External>/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary, use Music > Preferences|Settings > Files to Reset the media folder to <External>/Music/Media then, unless already prompted, use File > Library > Consolidate Files to copy in all files that haven't already been included by dint of being inside the folder you copied over earlier. Your entire library is now ready to use on another computer using the option-start-Music method to access it, and can be cloned to a second drive for security. You can clean up the unwanted content on the internal drive after a sanity check to make sure nothing you want has been left behind.

tt2

You'll want to move the folder that contains the actual music files and move the "Music Library.musiclibrary" file on its own with it. Only you can know what that is. I can't tell you which one, because I don't know where the actual music files are.

You don't need to move the top level Music Folder in your user profile though.

If you moved from iTunes to Apple Music then the folder with the actual media files should in the iTunes Media folder.

Otherwise it would be in the Music folder's Media folder.

Basically you need to verify where your tracks are pointing to. You can do that in the Music app by clicking on a track and then tapping Command+I to get the track info, and then going to the File tab, to see the actual location of the file.

On my library for instance, since I also upgraded from iTunes to Apple Music the tracks are actually located in a folder path like this: iTunes / iTunes Media / Music / Artist Name / Album Name / Track Name on the external drive.

While the Music Library file is at the same level as the iTunes folder.

Move the active folder and import all of the content from the other into it afterwards.

(262381)