Adding large, existing music file to nextcloud music

I’m a not-especially well-versed user trying to achieve something that seems like it should be doable, but I’m not sure how to execute it:

I have a folder of about 120GB of music on an external hard drive. I downloaded the Nextcloud Music app and enabled External Storages, thinking I could simultaneously add capacity to my server and get the Music app to pull directly from that folder on the hard drive. However, the only thing I can figure out how to do is upload the music files directly into the music server, which A) will take forever and B) will have the unintended consequence of producing duplicate copies of each music file, which would exceed the storage capacity of the server, even with the external hard drive factored in.

So, is there a way to direct the music app to read from that folder? Or a better solution?

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After enabling the External Storages support, you should open the Nextcloud settings and find the “External storages” under the “Adminstration” section. Here, you can mount your external HDD or any other directory from your Linux server to Nextcloud. For this, you should use the storage type “Local”. Then, your external drive will become visible as part of your Nextcloud file system. If you open the Nextcloud Files app, you should see the mounted drive directly under the root folder.

When the mounted drive is properly set up, also the Music app should see the folder just as any normal folder. Under the Music app settings, you can set the “Path to your music collection” to point to this mounted folder. But also the default path “/” should work because the mounted folder is under the root folder.