BONUS TIP #1: Have Your Cake, But Don't Always Eat It
You can also catalog songs in your iTunes library without adding them to the iTunes Music folder. So, for example, you can admire the depth of your 'NSync collection anytime, but only listen to it when you mount the hard drive containing your boy-band library. To set this up, open iTunes > Preferences > Advanced and uncheck the box labeled "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library." Now you can store the song files anywhere, such as a USB flash drive, an iPod (if you've enabled Disk Use in iTunes' iPod Summary window), or another external drive. Whenever you mount the drive on your Mac, iTunes will play the songs housed there transparently, but if you try playing a song on a drive that's not mounted, iTunes will throw an error and ask if you'd like to locate it.
Note that only one logged-in user can have iTunes open at a time, so quit iTunes before switching users. If you get errors about the disk being locked, select your boot drive, press Command-I (File > Get Info), and tweak the permissions so the volume is owned by the System and the Admin group has Read/Write access.
Now just add music, and it'll be added to your library list.
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November 10, 2009 at 10:13pm
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Oszi
June 05, 2007 at 11:52pm
I have the same problem like this DJ, the only thing is, I 'm still using Windows, unfortunately ;-(. Is there a way to do the same with Windows?
kay
May 31, 2007 at 10:01am
I seem to have the problem of too many libraries. I'm using two Macs, and two user accounts but sharing one external drive.
What do I need to do to get all of my music to play on both machines and download to my iPod?
Nigel
May 01, 2007 at 8:23am
Nice guide. I've been wondering about the same thing. There's one thing you don't mention though: play counts. When importing tracks to a new library and deleting them in the old one, you will lose your play counts (and dates and all that other stuff) won't you?
Al
March 03, 2007 at 5:55pm
I have over 1300 Jazz CDs primarily purchased for the trumpet player on the disk. I am an audiophile and have been playing with the convienence of random or shuffle playing of various or one specific player via iTunes through my main system. (Chet Baker 178 CDs, Dizzy 90+, etc)
I am thinking of purchasing a 1 TB harddrive, but I can envision needing more than this soon. I will not save files at less than full AIFF format, so this disk will be close to full already.
Is there a way to buy multiple smaller drives but STILL "party shuffle" play from the entire collection ?????? That way I could add a 250 or 500 drive as needed.
Is there a third party addon or stand alone music player that can ??
Also Are there any stand alone music players (Mac computer software) that can handle playback of DVD-A (24bit/192k or 24bit/96k PCM) or SACD quality files ??
Thanks
AL
ROb
March 07, 2007 at 6:37am
You might want to look at the glyph drives. These are made for just such and occasion.
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/GT103/These are designed to have keys.. So you can actually build a raid with 3 drives. Or just use one..
TheConfuzed1
March 04, 2007 at 8:29pm
Click on "Library."
Select "Random Play."
Enjoy.
