Setting up Multiple Libraries in iTunes
Have you ever had your hard drive running out of space and got frustrated because there is no good way to put your music on an external drive, but keep it accessible in your iTunes library? I ran out of space on my Laptop and dumped a lot of my music on my little network harddrive (a Buffalo Linkstation). However, it took me some time to find a graceful way to have iTunes set up with a proper (small) library of music on my laptop while also being able to access all the music on the network harddrive. Here is what I did to get there:
- When you launch iTunes, hold down the option (alt) key while it’s loading up. It’ll prompt you for the location of your library.
- You can now point it to the location where your music lives on your local harddrive (default is something like /home/Music/iTunes) or create a new library. I wanted to set up a new library for all the music on the networked harddrive. To do so, I created a new folder on that drive which I called iTunesNetworkLibrary.
- Import your music: Now open up iTunes, go to File->Import and pick the folder on your network drive where you dumped your music. Note that if under iTunes->Preferences->Advanced the checkbox for “Copy files to iTunes folder when adding” is to library” checked, all music files will be copied from their location on the network drive into your new library folder, doubling your space requirements. To avoid that, you can either uncheck this option or, if you can accomodate double space temporarily, keep it checked and delete the original music folder once iTunes copied the files into it’d new library folder.
- Next time you launch iTunes and hold down the Option key, you can select the iTuns library folder on the network (provided the drive is connected of course) or use your local library when on the road. That’s it!
Notes:
- It seems to me, that if you don’t hold down the option key at launch, iTunes will try to connect to the library you had open last time you launched.
- If you are using a wireless network to access your music, note that there can be performance issues when browsing/playing since the library is accessed over the air.
- The exact same procedure also works with iPhoto!
- I haven’t tried, but I presume that you can have one iPod per library
- If you need to remove duplicates from your library and aren’t saisfied with the built-in feature, I recommend iDupe.
- If you are interested in more advanced library management, there is Libra (I have not tried it, though).
- I haven’t tried this under Windows…if you have, please do comment!
- I am using iTunes 7, this may or may not work with earlier versions.
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