Managing Multiple Volumes Of iTunes Music

C

ChromePlanet

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I have way more music than will fit on any one hard drive (I even have a 500GB drive) and so the music spans 3 different hard drives.

iTunes keeps track of what music is on what drive until I move music from one drive (volume) to another. Then it loses track.

Previously when I have done this, I make sure the volume iTunes is using is set (in iTunes Preferences) to my source drive -- then I move the files -- then I change that setting to the destination drive -- iTunes chugs for a while displaying an "Updating iTunes Music Library..." dialogue. When it's done, iTunes knows where I moved the files.

This got me confident so I moved a bunch of files around among 3 different drives and told iTunes to switch volumes again, thinking it would find out where the files moved to. DIDN'T WORK.

So then I got to thinking maybe it only checks to see if a file moved FROM the volume originally listed in iTunes Preferences TO the volume you just changed it to.

So I changed iTunes Preferences a couple of times to see if that worked but it still wouldn't find where I moved the files to.

At the point I have NO IDEA what "Updating iTunes Music Library..." is doing.

Aside from editing the XML iTunes database manually (which I don't want to do) is there a way to do this in iTunes reliably?

Does Apple think people don't need to move their files around to different drives?
 
i think this may work:

1. go to itunes preferences and uncheck the options "Copy added music to library" and "Keep iTunes music organized".

2. go to a terminal and type the following command:

ln -s /Volumes/MusicVolume/MusicFolder /YourItunesFolder/MusicInHD2

where YourItunesFolder is the folder you have iTunes configured as iTunes music folder location, MusicVolume is the name of the HD containing the music, and MusicFolder is the name of your root music folder (ie /Volumes/SecondHD/Music) Repeat for all your volumes. This will create a symbolic link to the folder, and iTunes will think it is actually a folder.
If the path has a space, include with ".

i.e.:

ln -s /Volumes/MyFWDrive/Music "~/Documents/iTunes/Itunes Music\Music in MyFWDrive"

3. Add (by drag and drop) the folder /YourItunesFolder to itunes Library, it will add all your music, included the other volume

A symbolic link acts as the folder itself!

Do not activate EVER the options unchecked in step 1!! Hope this works
 
Ingenious idea, but I don't think it will work. I routinely move songs from one volume to another, and I don't see how the iTunes database would be updated unless I keep running a full import, which I don't want to do.

Also I cannot simply add folders to my library as they will lose all the iTunes database information collected for those songs. The files don't even have tags as they are all WAV files.

I still would like to know what "Updating iTunes Music Library..." is doing and why it worked when I did it initially (as described above).
 
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