How to Make Your Music Library Truly Portable – Part 3: Moving your Serato Files to the new portable drive

Time to Move your Serato library to your new portable drive.

So, lets do a quick re-cap. You have bought your new drive, backed up your music to a different drive, and moved your music via iTunes to the new portable drive you plan on gigging with. You did that right?

Ok, now its time to move your Scratch Live Library to your new drive without losing any cue points, loops or crates, etc.

Ready? Lets go... click to read more:

Note: if you are new to iTunes organizing your music and have lots of SSL crates, then you will most likely lose your crates and will need to re-build them. The file names will still be there, they just wont know where the file is. So its not that hard to re-build them. If you stuck with your method of organizing your files, or have always used iTunes' organization then your crates will transfer over with no problem at all.

If you need some catch-up, read these articles: Part 1: Buying the Portable Hard Drive, Part 2: Moving your iTunes Library to your new portable (if you use iTunes), Part 2.5: Why letting iTunes manage your library is best, and Part 4: Plug and Play (literally) is coming.

So Step 1 is already done. That is moving your music files to the new drive. We did that in Part 2 of this series. Thats good...

Step 2:
Create a "_ScratchLIVE_" folder on your portable drive (with no quotes). Don't just go strait into your drive and do this though. This is done within scratch live. Be sure your portable drive is plugged in. Here we go:

a. Open SSL, create a "crate" (its name does not matter).
b. Click on the "Files" tab in SSL and navigate to your new portable drive and find your music folder. It should be PortableDriveName > Music > iTunes > iTunes Music > all your artists and music will be in here.
c. Pick one song and drag it into your newly created crate. Any song will do. Once this is done and if you have a folder window open to your portable hard drive, you will now see a "_ScratchLIVE_" folder created on its root.
d. With your portable drive still connected, Quit out of Serato Scratch Live.

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Step 3: Its time to move your SSL contents from your internal drive to your new portable drive. This is fairly easy.

a. Open 2 windows, one with showing your internal drive, and another showing your portable drive. On the internal, navigate to your "ScratchLIVE" folder (this should be in your Username > Music folder). On you portable drive, navigate to your "_ScratchLIVE_" folder now located on the root of the drive.
b. Copy all of the contents from the internal drive's ScratchLIVE folder to the portable's "_ScratchLIVE_" folder. You can do this by dragging and dropping, or copy and pasting the contents. It does not matter, as long as it copies everything. If you are asked to replace files while you copy, select "yes to all" and hit "Replace".

Note: Copying all this makes sure all of your settings in serato are moved over to the new drive and everything will be as it was before. Your cue points, loops, comments, history, effects, and everything else will be copied over and you will not have lose any of that important data.

Step 4:
Rename your ScratchLIVE folder on your internal drive. Thats pretty simple. (Make sure Serato is still not open.) I recommend to rename it to "ScratchLIVEback_06-21-2010". The end is the date that you do this. This way you will know the date you last backed up your library and Serato will not read from the internal folder any longer.  If you don't do this step, Serato will read from both your internal and portable, essentially doubling up every file you have in Serato. You dont want that!

As an important note: The next time you open Searto, it will automatically put a "ScratchLive" folder back on your internal drive. You can ignore it. All the info going forward will now be saved to the portable drive.

Step 5:
Relocating your "lost" files.

Now that you moved everything, you need to update Serato on where all your files went! You will get the lost file icon if you try to play your files now. Here is what you need to do:
a. Open Serato and click on the "Files" tab.
b. Minimise Serato, so its a smaller window. Open a new finder window and navigate to your music folder on your portable drive. Drag your entire "iTunes Music" folder to the "relocate lost files" button in Serato. Serato will now relocating all of the files and associate these file all to the portable drive. No longer will they be associated to the internal. This will probably take some time for serato to rebuild the library.

Thats about it!
You could rescan your ID3 tags too, but its not necessary at this time. If you already had iTunes organization (or skipped that), and all your files have finished relocating, then your crates will all be ready to go too. If you use iTunes playlists, those should also be running off of your portable drive now too. Everything should be gravy.

In the last section, Part 4: Plug and Play, I will teach you how to properly make your library ready to be played off of any computer. This one will be fairly short, and by now, you might have already figured it out. If you have followed Part 1, Part 2, Part 2.5, and this section Part 3, then you are already 95% ready to go!