Once you move the tracks on your internal HDD to the external HDD, click the Files button and click Relocate Lost FIles. Make sure the external is connected.

That will not work. I have two drives, internal and external. Both share crates and need to be put on one bigger external. The method you mentioned is great for moving from one hdd to another not merging.

Mmmmm, ur moving music from ur external to another, lost files works. U move music from ur internal to this new external, lost files works.

Again both hard drives share the same crates. So if I put both crates into a new hard drive they will overwrite each other.

Sharing the crates has nothing to do with relocating the files. Relocating the files is only concerned with finding the new path of the tracks. They will remain in the crates.

Except for the fact that the two serato folders have the same names in sub crates thus overwriting the other. So half my music will not show up.

OK Vinny here's what you gotta do. I've been there before,

1. eject and unplug your external HDD
2. open Serato and create a crate called ALLMUSIC
3. click all in Serato highlight one of the songs press control-A (Command-A on mac) to highlight all files.
4. drag all files to the ALLMUSIC Crate.
5. close Serato
6. rename the Serato folders _Serato_ and _Serato_Backup on your internal drive most like in your music folder on the computer.
7. open Serato it should be blink. Plug in your external it should show the music that is only on the external drive.
8. rename every crate by adding ext or 2 to the end of it's name.
9. Close Serato
10. Copy or Move the music to the external drive preferably into its own folder if you have a ton of music.
11. Copy the folders Crates, Subcrates, and Smartcrates from _Serato_ to the same folder on the External HDD. Say yes to all when it ask to merge folders. It should not ask to overwrite files since we renamed the External Crates.
12. rename neworder.pref to something else so the folders can be sorted in stock order.
13. Open Serato, Click files find the folder that contains all the music from the internal highlight it and drag it to the Relocate lost files or relocate button. or if you integrated it into your existing music drag it's main or the external drive folder to relocate button and Wait until it finishes.
14. copy the songs from the folder to the copy of it's self with the ext or 2 or what ever you renamed it to. and delete the the original by highlighting the crate and pressing ctrl-delete. The crates from both drives will be consolidated into one. if a crate don't fave 2 or ext at the end means it was on the internal only. now u can rename the crates to it's original name after deleting the original ones from the internal drive.
15. click all music again highlight all songs and copy to ALLMUSIC again.
16. Close Serato
17. Rename neworder.pref back to original name to get sorting back if wanted or leave in alphabetical order.
18. rename the ALLMUSIC.crate to something else or just delete the e at the end.
19. open Serato and all the music should be from the external HDD now.

all should be good from this point on. if your databaseV2 file gets corrupt just delete it rename the ALLMUSIC crate back or add the e back to the end and open Serato and it will rebuild the databaseV2 from scratch.
Hope this helps everyone trying to consolidate HDD's.
:)

Yes! I had that same thought of renaming the sub crates on one of the drives to "cratename2" and then when all is on one hard drive just drag and drop em to the original folder !! Thanks for that and understanding what I meant.

you are making it much too difficult on yourselves.

1) In Serato, Open File
locate the folder(s) on the source drive.
2) While in the Files window, drag the source folder to the destination location within the files window
3) A dialog box will appear (Copy or Move). Choose Move. Also check the box to remove the original references

It will move the files to the other location and update all of the crates at the same damn time. If two drives have the same crate name, Serato doesn't care...

There is no need to do anything outside of Serato and there is no need to Relocate Lost files.

The Serato MOVE command is all that is required to merge, move, copy or whatever.

if it is not done this way it will screw up the crates songs will be missing you will have to recreate the crates from scratch because only some songs will be there. if songs are in both crates it will be gone from both crates and will have to be re added from the all crate.
I been consolidating from 5 different 2 and 4 tb drives. I done this more than once and had to keep doing different things until it was right. when I used the Serato move command all the songs was not in the crate but all the music was in the all crate. the crates had duplicates also. who knows the version of Serato I used could have had a bug in it or something. this method has been proven and works all the time for me. there may also be easier methods out there, but this one works all the time for me. :)

I tried that, it wouldn't work for my hip hop folder, it was too large, and it accidentally deleted some of my crates on the old hard drives. The other method renaming the subcrates was so much easier, i renamed them all with a 2 at the end, then once i relocated lost files and everything was found, i just merged folders. It was fast and easy.

I know me too that is why I developed this method after a lot of the others failed

When you say it failed what happened? I have done several thousand songs at a time using this method. I didn't try to do the whole drive content at once.

I use this method all the time because I usually do all of the cratework on the local drive and then periodically I move crates/folders into an external drive. Its an integral part of my workflow.

I will keep this other method in mind if I ever encounter the issue. This is good feedback.

Thanks

something always happen during the copy or move process. It also could have been a bug in the version of Serato I used at the time. once I started using my method I never did the built in one ever since.

I have a crate with sub crates inside consisting of about 37k songs. Sorted by dirty or clean, instrumental, acapella, intro clean, intro dirty, transitions etc etc. I originally tried the copy move method and it spun the wheel for a good 10m and did nothing, just went back to normal use. My smaller ones copied but when I restarted Serato some crates were gone. Luckily I made a backup of my Serato folder. Honestly the best method is changing the folder names in the sub crate file. It's faster too

I thinking of merging some external HD currently.

The drag and drop method seems to beach ball or cause serato to hang.

I'm think what if I

1. I copy just the music files from the source external Hds to the single new HD

2. Rename the main folders holding the media in the original external HDs

3. Then reboot Serato with all the Hds plugged in i.e old externals and new external

4. Then rescan library, obviously Serato will declare that the files are missing

5. Then use relocate to direct it to the new HD.

I decided to go with the drag and drop within Serato method. Cumbersome but seems it's the least likely method that I will lose crates.

Plus it will merge crates that I have automatically.

I was using two Hds to gig and the Crates/subcrates contains files from both Hds. So straight merging will lead to me losing some crated songs

going folder by folder and removing original links as I plan to format the OG harddrive after.

I have two full backups in case things go wrong.

Your the best. Been looking for a solution to merge my crates from the external drive to the internal drive. This seems to be a guaranteed way. Now do I just copy the folders and files from the external, or so i need to copy the _Serato_ and _Serato_Backup_ folders to the new folder I made on the internal?

sorry for the late post. If you move the folder while in the FILE section of Serato, you dont have to move any _Serato_ folders or crates. The software will do all of that.

This IS the way. I have spent nearly a week trying to do this many other ways and it was driving me nuts because I thought I had done everything right. But moving the files from WITHIN Serato automatically updated the references to the songs.

Thanks again!