Moving the Music Folder

I have, literally, thousands of music files on my system. And, I know others who have a lot more digital music than I do. By default, Windows stores those music files in the Music folder. If you have quite a few music files, you may want to move the music folder to a larger or faster hard drive.

Since the Music library is just a folder, you can move files into it, like .mp3, .m4a, etc., and create sub-folders in it. Unlike a regular folder (a library is special; it is considered a system folder) if you want to relocate it to another location you need to do so a little differently.

As an example, let's say you want to move the Music folder to "D:\Music." To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open a Windows Explorer window (in windows 7) or a File Explorer window (in Windows 8 or Windows 10. The easiest way to do this is to simply press Win+E.
2. Navigate to the folder C:\Users\<user>. (Replace <user> with your user name—the one you use to log into Windows.) You should see the My Music folder listed in the Explorer window.
3. Right-click the My Music folder and, from the resulting Context menu, choose Properties. Windows displays the My Music Properties dialog box.
4. Make sure the Location tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. Changing the location of the Music folder.

5. Enter the path to where you want the Music library located. In this case, you would enter D:\Music.
6. Click on OK. Windows prompts you to ensure you want to make the change and whether you want to move the existing music files to the new location.
7. Click Yes (to signify you want to move the files).

Note that if you ever want to move things back to their default location of "C:\Users\<user>", you can go through the same procedure, but click the Restore Default button on the Location tab of the dialog box and everything will be moved back.

 This tip (12948) applies to Windows 7, 8, and 10.