The tip on organizing PDFs in iTunes was great (“50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know,”). Now how about letting us know how to get back to our original iTunes catalogs, and better yet, how to switch between the music and the PDF files?
No problem, and we’re glad you asked--we accidentally left that part out. To switch between your libraries, just hold down the Option key while you’re launching iTunes. You’ll see a dialog with buttons for Create Library or Choose Library. Click the Choose Library button, which will launch a file-browser dialog where you can navigate to your normal iTunes library, which is most likely in your ~/Music/iTunes folder and is probably called iTunes Library. Select that file and
click Open.
Hold down Option when launching iTunes to pick the library.
If your PDF iTunes library was saved in the same folder and you’re having trouble telling the two apart, we recommend opening both and then changing the location of the non-music iTunes library--try the Documents folder instead. You can still use it by holding down Option when launching iTunes, clicking Choose Library, and navigating to the PDF library’s new location. If you don’t hold down Option while launching iTunes, the app opens with the last library you looked at, whether that’s your music or your PDFs.
Bonus: You can juggle multiple iPhoto libraries by using the same technique: Hold Option when launching iPhoto for a dialog that lets you create a new library or choose an existing one. iPhoto will default to the last library viewed, unless you hold Option while launching it and choose a different library.
