Moving Your Library Temp

Intro

These instructions are for moving your music files from your internal drive to an external drive. The reason you might want to have actual music files are on an external volume is to save space on your internal drive.

Note: If you're moving from an external to a new external, just clone the external drive and that's it.

Keep in mind that the instructions below apply only to music that you have ripped from your CD collection or purchased from the built-in kJams stores. That is, it does not work for files you have Added to the Library. In other words, if you have imported pre-existing MP3+G files, this procedure will not help you. In that case, use the The Symbolic Link Trick below.

There are two ways you can move your music files: (1) you can move just the music files, or (2) you can move the files, plus your library settings. Each has its advantage and disadvantage.

Moving Just the Files

Advantage → You can run kJams even if the volume is offline, creating playlists, setting pitches, creating/ editing singers, editing meta info, or performing any other editing or management function.

Disdavantage → You can't rip, play or burn, and your settings (songs & meta info, playlists, singers, etc.) won't transfer automatically if you plug the external drive into another machine.davequestion: you can't play songs? that's quite a disadvantage! What am I not understanding?

Moving Files and Settings

Advantage → You can take your drive to a different machine and plug it in and the kJams on THAT machine will now be up-to-date with all your playlists, singers, venues, rotation, songs and related meta info.

Disadvantage → You cannot run kJams with the volume offline.

Moving Just the Files

1. In the Finder, go to ~/Music/kJams/ and find kJams Music folder.
2. Drag that folder wherever you want. If you copy it to an external volume, it will be copied, so be sure to delete the original after you make the copy.
3. In kJams, go to Edit → Preferences → Advanced and click the Change button to set the library location to the new place. Select kJams Music from wherever you placed it in the previous step. davequestion: do we need to include any warnings? seems like you could really screw things up here...

Moving Files and Settings

1. In the Finder, go to ~/Music/kJams/
2. Drag that entire folder (the one called "kJams") to your external volume. Delete the original afterwards.
3. On that other volume, select the newly copied kJams folder and make an alias.
4. Drag that alias into your ~/Music/ folder, make sure you rename the alias so it just says "kJams", not "kJams alias"
5. You can now delete the alias from the other volume. You don't need it any more.
6. Now, on all the machines you plan to use this library with:
   1. Plug in the drive, then launch kJams.
   2. Go to Edit → Preferences → Advanced and click the Change button to set the library location to the new place. The location is the kJams Music folder inside the kJams folder on your external volume.

Cloning a Setup

If you want to maintain a fully working, ready-to-run backup of your entire setup, you can do so. Keep in mind, however, that this will require you to manually maintain sync between the two systems. Click here for more information. Cloning