I’ve been keeping my iTunes Music folder in “/Users/Shared” for a couple of years, so I tested by moving it back into my home folder. I found that the file which needed to be edited was ”~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.xml” instead of “~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml”, but I made the necessary path changes using the current BBEdit (a limited version can be used at no charge, if you don’t have it). iTunes was not running at any time from start to finish of the process, and I performed a restart of the system before launching it.

I did more than just perform a find and replace for the pertinent path fragment in the iTunes Library.xml file, however. I am running the latest High Sierra. As expected, the folder didn’t move when I tried to drag it from /Users/Shared into my home folder in Finder, but instead an incomplete version of it was copied even though there’s room on my internal drive for two of the folders to exist (that’s not the case for you). I deleted that one and started over. I was prompted by the Finder to enter a password when I tried to command-drag it, so I stopped at that point and used Directory Utility in /System/Library/Coreservices/Applications to enable the root user so I would be able to avoid permissions complications by performing the move while logged in as root. I can provide help with temporarily enabling the root user login if you need it, or I can provide Terminal commands to accomplish the same move operation on the folder, if you prefer. More in Part 3.

Laine Lee