[trainee]

Attention: This is a rant.

Laptop hard drives are small, iTunes libraries are huge, especially when you also have a lot of movies.

So what do you do? You put your songs on an external hard drive!
Great, problem solved you think, but suddenly all sorts of bad things happen.
Your laptop drive gets filled with podcasts everytime you start iTunes while you external is turned off. You have to consolidate your library to get it all in one place again, but then you have duplicate files on your internal hard drive that have to be removed manually. Updates can destroy your library database. And you can't listen to your music while on the go, because it's all on your external drive, which is at home.

There are multiple solutions for some of these issues (mainly for the last one), but all of them require manual synching of selected songs that should be stored on the internal hard drive.

Even the new "multiple libaries" feature in iTunes 7 does not make it any better. You could put your favorite songs in a seperate library which resides on your laptop. But then you cannot listen to these songs and all the other songs at the same time, because you can only have one active library at a time! You can't have playlists which contain a mixed set of songs from different libraries, either.
So you end up manually synching your favorite songs between both libraries, to play all the songs at a time while at home. Very ugly!

And then there is still this bizarre mixture of global preferences and library specific settings, that I still haven't figured out. And I don't want to, because I know it will get messy.

So, why is it still so hard to have a robust mechanism for storing your songs in different locations?
What I want:

• Store the largest part of my music on my external hard drive
• Store another part on my Powerbook
• Play all of my music at the same time when my external hard drive is connected (without the issues mentioned above and without manual help)

And would be so easy to implement:

• Implement true multiple libraries, that can be mounted in the iTunes source list at the same time.
• Seperate library settings (iTunes-managed music folder and location) from global preferences.
• Each library has its own location anywhere on any hard drive.
• Tie each song to one library and store it in the appropriate location.
• Put the library database in the same location where the music is and make it appear as one big file (like in iPhoto 08)
• Seperate playlist management from the libraries, so you can mix songs from different locations.
• When libraries are not available, they are grayed-out. Songs that are tied to these libraries get the exclamation mark

The good thing about it:
For beginners that are sticking to the default library, everything would appear as always, because only one library would show up in iTunes. They wouldn't notice any difference.
Power users would finally have all the freedom they want to organized and distribute their media across multiple locations.

Considering iTunes is one of Apple's most widely used apps and that this is an issue, lots of people are facing, since most people are using laptops these days, there is absolutely no excuse for Apple to make such a trivial task so horribly complicated.

So when will this nightmare finally end?

[Brad]

Originally Posted by trainee So what do you do? You put your songs on an external hard drive!

Works for me...

Originally Posted by trainee Your laptop drive gets filled with podcasts everytime you start iTunes while you external is turned off.

Fortunately, I don't download podcasts.

Originally Posted by trainee You have to consolidate your library to get it all in one place again, but then you have duplicate files on your internal hard drive that have to be removed manually.

Why would you do this, though? I just put the files on the external drive and add them to iTunes with the "Copy files" option unchecked. No duplicate files, no need to consolidate anything.

Originally Posted by trainee Updates can destroy your library database.

I've never had an iTunes update destroy my library on any of four computers over the years, and I've been using iTunes since version 1.0. Maybe I'm lucky?

Originally Posted by trainee And you can't listen to your music while on the go, because it's all on your external drive, which is at home.

Well, that's a given. What else would you expect? If you really want remote access, you could turn on file sharing on your home computer, assuming your external drive is connected there, and mount the drive on your notebook over the Internet. It'd probably be a little slow, but you don't need a lot of bandwidth for a single music stream.

Originally Posted by trainee Even the new "multiple libaries" feature in iTunes 7 does not make it any better. You could put your favorite songs in a seperate library which resides on your laptop. But then you cannot listen to these songs and all the other songs at the same time, because you can only have one active library at a time! You can't have playlists which contain a mixed set of songs from different libraries, either.

Here's an idea: When adding music from the external drive, put it into an playlist called "external". To see music not on the external drive, create a smart playlist with the setting of "playlist is not external". Therefore, you have all your music in one library, but the playlists can differentiate between the location of the files.

Originally Posted by trainee And then there is still this bizarre mixture of global preferences and library specific settings, that I still haven't figured out. And I don't want to, because I know it will get messy.

What bizarre mixture of global preferences and settings? Granted, I don't use the multiple libraries feature; so, maybe I'm just not aware of its quirks.

Originally Posted by trainee What I want: Store the largest part of my music on my external hard drive Store another part on my Powerbook Play all of my music at the same time when my external hard drive is connected (without the issues mentioned above and without manual help)

Does my above suggestion resolve this issue?

Originally Posted by trainee So when will this nightmare finally end?

I must be weird for being able to manage my thousands of songs without headaches because I never "get" all the problems people seem to have with their libraries.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by Brad ... I must be weird for being able to manage my thousands of songs without headaches because I never "get" all the problems people seem to have with their libraries.

You're not weird. I have the same experience as you and have for years, though not as many as you.

[chucker]

I've never had iTunes bugger up my library either, but I've only used iTunes since mid-'02.

That said, I can sympathize that this is one area where iTunes could improve. Much like I can effectively make my iPod libraries "subsets" of the iTunes library, I wish I could have a similar subset on my laptop hard drive. When adding songs to it, they'd sync to the complete library whenever the external drive is connected; when the external drive is connected, I want all songs available.

I can't seem to accomplish such a setup without major pain.

[Artap99]

I have only had one problem with putting my iTunes music on an external. I went through and loaded up all of my music with all the tags necessary and put album art on every single file. But now the album art isn't showing up. Not even when I drag the file to my computer and load it into iTunes.

[PKIDelirium]

I've been using iTunes since January 2005, and other than one random-ass glitch that required me to restore the library from my iPod using iPodRip, I've never had any problems.

I've never tried using an external hard drive, though.