Here is what I want. I have three folders with music in a 1 terabyte external hd. Two are named music 1 and music 2. The third is an itunes library. I have a mac mini with an itunes I have not yet fucked up. I want to have itunes recognize all the music in all three folders on the 1 tb external drive, but I DO NOT want copies on my mac mini. I want all the music to play from the external hd. Walk me through this like I am an idiot, because, you know, I am.
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James K. Polk, Esq.
Get a Mac, they just work.
Wut?
handy
I thought the comment about scrubbing the xml file with a regex was ace (though let’s be honest Cole you really should just polish up on your Core Foundation API skills and write the damned app to do it yourself, and stop expecting handouts from everyone you commie.)
MBunge
1. Go online.
2. Buy CDs of your favorite music.
3. Wait for the CDs to be delivered to your home.
4. Listen to the CDs and relax in knowing that your music can’t be lost to you through a bad line of code or your “cloud” provider deciding you’re not paying enough.
Mike
Hawes
Here is what I want. I have three folders with music in a mumbley peg piddle bottom. I have a mambo dogface in the banana patch with an itunes I have not yet fucked up. I want to have itunes recognize all the music in all mareseydotes and doeseydotes, but I DO NOT want copies on my mambo dogface in the banana patch. I want all the music to play from the marseydotes. Walk me through this like I am an idiot, because, you know, I am.
That’s what I read, so… sorry.
Sarah Proud and Tall
This is going to go well.
different-church-lady
I was starting to poke around on Apple iTunes support pages trying to make sure that my ideas for this were legit. And then I suddenly realized I have a list of my own damn problems to solve as long as a Clinton convention speech.
Snark Based Reality
Hi. I just wanted to stop by and point out that iTunes is a steaming pile of dogshit without me actually adding any useful information to this conversation. My hate of that software runs that deep.
Larryb
@James K. Polk, Esq.: word
different-church-lady
@Snark Based Reality: That’s probably still more accurate than 85% of the answers he’s going to get.
Warmongerer
@MBunge:
An external hard-drive is “the cloud”? Do you understand how computers work or are you too busy being a hipster Luddite?
Bill E Pilgrim
This is like a really bad tech support call and we’re the tech support. Cup holder?
Bibliohunter
Move your iTunes library to the external hard rive. Make sure your iTunes knows where the music went.
Bibliohunter
Move your iTunes library to the exterhrive hard drive. Make sure your iTunes knows where the music went.
different-church-lady
@MBunge: CLOUD GOOD! MEATSPACE BAD! CLOUD GOOD! MEATSPACE BAD!
I’d channel me some Louis CK here (“…but I have to go in the other room to get a CD!”), but I’m low on energy today.
Martin
Go into iTunes > Preferences > Advanced. Turn OFF ‘Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized’ and ‘Copy Files to iTunes Media Folder’. Now drag Music 1 and Music 2 folders onto the iTunes icon. It’ll add the music from those folders to iTunes’s internal database but not move or copy the actual files.
This is the easy way to keep your collection organized, but I suspect you might regret it later. Adding new music to iTunes now requires that you organize it manually in the Finder, which is a pain in the ass. Having everything in one place is vastly better/easier if you can bring yourself to that place.
Snark Based Reality
DuckDuckGo coughed up this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iTunesMac/10.1/en/itns2964.html
Have phun!
I must be an oldster if I prefer to organize music at the file system level and consider “management” tools like iTunes to be long term harmful because they don’t store their metadata at the filesystem level. Hello tool lock-in!
Brachiator
@John Cole:
Have you looked at the various specific tips at ilounge?
Another that may help is here.
Calouste
Some people, like Snark Based Reality, would argue you’re already passed the fucked up point.
Provider_UNE
I don’t use Itunes as I have heard too many bad things about it, plus I am primarily a linux guy and have a host of options at my disposal. However I did a bit of googling and came up with a couple of links that might help you out.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
This one is a bit older but deals specifically with external drives.
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/19/how-to-keep-your-itunes-library-on-an-external-hard-drive/
A couple more that might be helpful
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1751
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/
From what I can tell it should not be too difficult.
Good Luck!
.
different-church-lady
@Snark Based Reality:
Get a mac. They just work.
The catch being that Apple is really shitty at telling you HOW they just work without your doing a lot of digging.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Remember when you map your iTunes to a library on an external drive, as soon as you launch iTunes with it disconnected it’s going to default to the internal drive.
directions
Provider_UNE
Looks like I was beaten to the punch. nice work guys.
.
MTiffany
It’s not iToonces fault it doesn’t do what you want; you just want the wrong thing.
@Snark Based Reality: Coming in with a groaner: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature…”
Martin
@James K. Polk, Esq.: Well, they do actually. If he just drags the files into iTunes on a brand new computer – bang, it’s done, and done right. He’s trying to maintain two different organizational systems simultaneously – an arbitrary one of his choosing, and a canonical one based on artists, albums, etc. Nobody solves that problem well, particularly scaled. Managing hundreds of songs is easy. Managing 10,000 is hard.
Provider_UNE
Also, too, you might simply want to move your Music 1 and 2 folders into the Itunes library folder before telling the mini where to look for it.
That is all.
Good day sir!
.
Larryb
I would pay a bundle for a solution that would combine an itunes-compatible media server, a backup server compatible with both macs and pcs and a print server. Oh, yes, and doesn’t need a friggin IT certification to configure. You know, what every other house in America has needed since around 2002.
ABL
i don’t know why i find this all so funny.
rreay
OK.
On the new iTunes go to the settings and make sure that copy files to iTunes (under advanced) is not checked.
Then simply file->add folder to library…
This will leave all the files in place and not make any new ones.
This may leave duplicates in new iTunes library database. If so you can:
File->Display duplicates and then manually remove the duplicates. It asks if you want to trash the base file, simply say no.
Or, there are several apps that claim to be able to do this. I have no experience with any of them. Google for iTunes cleaner.
If this doesn’t do what you want you can nuke the new library and start again, all the files remain untouched.
a.j.
needs more fire.
and hammers.
remember – it’s Cole we’re talking to here :)
different-church-lady
@ABL: You have a life? I’ll bet that’s it.
JonF
Uncheck “copy music to Itunes Media Folder when adding to library” in ITunes preferences.
James K. Polk, Esq.
These instructions are just so *simple* I can’t see how anyone would want to just maintain file level access to their music.
Martin
@Snark Based Reality:
Uh, what? There’s two levels of metadata here:
1) ID3 tags, which are in the files themselves, and which OS X indexes in Spotlight so you can go in the Finder, create a new Smart Folder, press the little + on the criteria, select ‘Other…’ under the Kind menu, choose ‘greater than’, choose ‘Duration’, enter ‘3’ under minutes, hit the + again, select ‘Genre’ under the same menu, type in ‘Jazz’ and the Finder will maintain a folder of jazz songs that are 3 minutes or longer. You can choose tempo (bpm) album, bitrate, user rating, you name it. Copy the files to any other computer and the metadata go with them.
2) The playlists sit above that level and are stored in the iTunes.xml file so you can export them and hunk that out whenever you want. Or you can right-click on your playlist, hit export, and choose plain text, unicode, xml, M3U, or M3U8.
There’s no lock-in here, it’s all as open-standard as you can make it, but the freetards are as bad at accurately representing Apple as the teatards are at anything the left does.
different-church-lady
@James K. Polk, Esq.: You mean, like, go to the shelf and pull the CD you want off of it?
Martin
@James K. Polk, Esq.: You still have file level access. iTunes doesn’t swallow your content, at worst it moves it into artists/album/filename hierarchy in the file system. The only thing it maintains is a database of references to where everything is located.
And its easy – just drag your files into iTunes. Done. Cole is trying to do something stupid.
Emdee
OK, Cole, let’s give this a try despite huge thread sabotage efforts.
First concept: iTunes only plays music that is “in your iTunes Library.” This does not necessarily mean that the files have been moved to a specific place, like inside the “Music” folder on your unfucked Mini. It means that at some point, you told iTunes about these files and said “I want you to play these.” It often gets easier if you let iTunes copy everything to a specific folder, but you do not have to do that.
This means you can add “music1” and “music2” to your iTunes library without copying them anywhere. iTunes will simply look for the files where they were when you added them.
To make sure iTunes does not copy new music into your “iTunes Music” folder on the Mini:
1. On the Mini, open iTunes and pick “Preferences,” then pick the “Advanced” tab at the end with the gear icon.
2. Make sure “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library is not checked.”
Now you can add things to iTunes without it making copies of them on the Mini. Next, make sure your external hard drive is connected to the Mini.
3. On the Mini, Drag the “music1” and “music2” folders to the iTunes icon in the Dock. This tells iTunes to add all the files in these folders (and their subfolders) to the library, but it will not copy them anywhere because of step 2 above.
You said you have an iTunes Library as well, and I’m presuming it’s not the one on the Mini, and you want all those songs available on the Mini as well. To add them all to the Mini’s library without copying them (thanks to step 2):
4. On the Mini, drag the iTunes Library folder you want to the iTunes Dock icon (or into the iTunes main window, either way). This will do just what step 3 did, but for the files inside that iTunes library.
At this point, all of the files in music1, music2, and the third folder containing an older iTunes Library should be available in the Mini’s main iTunes window. There may be duplicates if the same files were in multiple folders (say, in both music1 and music2). To find these, in iTunes on the Mini, pick File > Display Duplicates, and then fix them as you see fit.
Potential problem:
You said the third folder on the external hard drive contains an “iTunes Library.” Technically, an iTunes Library is just an index of files that iTunes knows about and can play. (This is why you don’t have to copy files into your music folder for iTunes to play them, per steps 1-2.) If that pre-existing iTunes Library (which I will call “the old iTunes Library” for clarity) is just an index, and the music files are not actually kept within that folder, then dragging the folder to new iTunes on the Mini will not actually add anything.
If that’s the case, there’s one easy way to get it in shape, but it requires copying files. On the older machine that uses this old iTunes Library as its main library, do what was said in the old thread: File > Library > Organize Library… > Consolidate Library. That will go find all the music/media files this library knows about and copy them into the “iTunes Library” folder for that older machine. At that point, you can drag that older “iTunes Library” folder into the Mini’s iTunes icon/window and it will find all the files and add them.
For the most part, what you want to do is no problem—just tell iTunes not to copy files onto the Mini, then drag all the music you want into iTunes. It’s only “importing” an older library into a new copy of iTunes that gets tricky, because iTunes doesn’t have an “import library” function. In that case, and that case only, you’ll have to consolidate all of the old library’s files into one place and then drag that into the Mini’s iTunes window or icon.
Do note that while this will do exactly as you ask, iTunes will complain like a conservative called on his bullshit if you then try to run it on the Mini without the external hard drive connected. This is just how life works. iTunes is perfectly willing to let you store your music wherever, but it does expect to have access to it while it’s running.
justawriter
I think where our host is being tripped up is that no one has mentioned step one yet. He has to tell iTunes that he wants his music on the external drive instead of the internal mac mini drive. Which is iTunes>Preferences>Advanced then where it says iTunes Media Folder Location, select Change and then choose the folder on the external drive. Then you can import the other folders into the iTunes folder (after which the Music1 and Music2 folders can be deleted or kept as backup files) or use rreay’s method.
janeform
ABL @27 (sorry — I still don’t know how to do that reply thingy): LOL. My husband is a geek and it’s really fun teasing him about this stuff.
Bill E Pilgrim
John:
What @Martin: wrote. Should work. Several others also but his has all the “drag this here” and “do this” and etc so as to be concrete.
NB: @Emdee: This too.
jncc
1) get a computer with a large enough hard drive to store all of your music
2) get an external HD that is 1.5 to 2x as large to use as your time machine backup.
3) move all of the music from the 3 or 4 different places you have it onto the new computer
4) back it all up.
Yes, I know this is not what you want to hear.
If you do develop a work around, then you are going to be backing up the mini and the external HD to what, a third external HD? You are backing up regularly, right ???
gbear
@MBunge: Agreed. Go buy the CD. What’s the point of getting yourself so bent out of shape over the technical aspects just for the ‘pleasure’ of having songs spewed at you randomly?
different-church-lady
@janeform: It’s really easy: you open up the .xml file for the thread with a text editor, find the comment you want to reply to, enter [reply27] (include the brackets), calculate the number of bits corresponding to the characters in your reply and append that to your comment. Oh, save a copy of the original file first.
Or, you can hover your mouse over the lower right corner of the post you want to respond to until the previously hidden “Reply” link appears, and the rest will take care of itself.
RareSanity
Dammit Cole!
You are making this unnecessarily hard, for no apparent reason. In doing so, you are guaranteeing some future heartburn at a higher level, because your library will have grown in this ridiculous layout you are trying to setup.
Here is the simple answer:
1. Get an external hard drive, large enough to hold all of your music. If the one you have is large enough, skip to step 3.
2. Copy the intact iTunes library to the larger drive and set iTunes to use that as the default, then import that library.
3. Connect the other hard drive and copy the folders into iTunes. Don’t argue about this shit, if you don’t want to constantly, manually maintain your music, let iTunes handle it.
This will leave you with a pristine iTunes library, that can move to different computers, contains all of the current music you have. It will also leave the “other” hard drive intact.
Stop asking for help doing unconventional shit, when you have no patience to do the unconventional shit needed to do it!
different-church-lady
@gbear:
The funny thing is that when I want songs spewed at me randomly I tend to listen to a radio station (internet or terrestrial) rather than my own music collection.
Personally I’ve never really enjoyed the collision of a fragment of Mahler Symphony with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But maybe that’s just me.
janeform
@different-church-lady: Thanks! Very funny, and duh [hand to forehead].
different-church-lady
@RareSanity: You realize Cole only does this for the amusement of watching us fly into a dither, don’t you?
different-church-lady
@janeform: Actually, when you think about it, it’s not that ‘duh’ — if I recall correctly at one point the reply button was always visible, and the first day it became a a roll-over I spent an hour or two thinking “Where’d the reply button go?” before I stumbled over it.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“Remember when you map your iTunes to a library on an external drive, as soon as you launch iTunes with it disconnected it’s going to default to the internal drive.”
For iTunes 8.0 on Windoze, having part of the library on an external drive made iTunes run like a constipated paraplegic in tank of molasses.
The solution was to give my old laptop to my wife, and buy a new computer with a bigger hard drive for all my crap.
I don’t know if updates to iTunes have reduced the pain. But I’d be really reluctant to put my library on an external drive.
SlothropRedux
Here is a serious answer. This will get all of the music on that external hard drive into iTunes and it will keep the files themselves on the external hard drive. It will also add any new files you buy or try to add to iTunes to that external hard drive. If you’re willing to live with that, here’s how to do what you ask.
First, I would change the name of that “itunes library” folder on the external drive. Make it something like “old itunes library.” Then I would drag the other two folders with music in them into that “old itunes library” folder. Just shove ’em in there.
1) Open iTunes
2) Open iTunes > Preferences and click on the “Advanced” tab
3) Unclick the “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library” box
4) Where it says, “iTunes Media folder location” click on the “Change…” button
5) This will open a typical mac file navigation dialog box. Find your external hard drive on the left side of the box and click on it (just once). This should show the folders and files in that hard drive in the window on the right side of this box.
6) Click on the “New Folder” button. This will create a new folder where all the data iTunes needs will live. It can be named anything you want, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s name the folder, “iTunes Music” and then click the “Create” button
7) Click on the “Open” button in the lower right corner of the window.
8) If you have done everything right to this point you should see something under where it says, “iTunes Media folder location” that looks like “/Volumes/(Name of external hard drive)/iTunes Music”
9) You are now done with the setup. Click on the “OK” button.
10) Now you want to let your iTunes know where all your music is. So click on the “File” menu and select “Add to Library”
11) This will open another of those typical Mac file navigation dialogues. Find your external hard drive on the left side, click on it, and the folders on the top level of that hard drive will show up in the window.
12) click once on that “old itunes music” folder that you renamed earlier. It should have all your music in it now, since you put the other two folders inside of it.
13) click on the “Open” button in the lower right corner. This will start the process of linking up all those songs w/ iTunes. It could take a long time depending on how much music is in there. When the process is done for that folder…
14) There is no step 14
15) drink… assuming you haven’t been drinking yet… and enjoy your music library!
Martin
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Might be a Windows thing. I have my iTunes library on a NAS connected to my 5 year old Mini via gigabit ethernet. With 20k+ songs and I don’t know how many hundreds of movies and TV shows it runs great even when I’m sharing content to another computer in the house via wireless.
burnspbesq
@Martin:
What Martin said, but not exactly.
It will be easier if you move everything into the iTunes Media folder on the external drive, then go into preferences/advanced and tell iTunes where all the music is. You can plug the external drive (assuming it’s USB or Ethernet) into a wireless router, but eventually you’ll regret that because you’ll get dropouts and latency when other things are grabbing bandwidth.
For the best sound, plug the external drive into the mini using FireWire.
burnspbesq
Also too, ditch the 1TB drive and get a 4TB raid array. You don’t want to have to worry about backing up a big music library, and you don’t want to worry about losing it in the event of a drive failure.
RareSanity
@different-church-lady:
Obviously…
He knows that OCD geeks (me included) can’t resist. We’re all a part of his sick game of, “poke a geek with a stick”.
He can figure out how to install and configure dual graphics cards, but somehow iTunes libraries are beyond comprehension!
Well Cole, you won’t have RareSanity to kick around anymore!
(Yes, you will…like I said, geeks can’t resist)
srv
What happens when your external crashes?
burnspbesq
@Larryb:
Oh, you mean an Time Capsule?
burnspbesq
@srv:
Suicidal tendencies (and not the band of that name). Hence my advice at 51.
joeyess
Jesus, Cole.
They’re really friendly and quicker than this method.
Welcome to Mac, biaaatch.
J.W. Hamner
I’m no fan of iTunes, but I am at a loss as to why Cole specifically doesn’t want his music to be sensibly organized. I would follow @SlothropRedux‘s advice.
jncc
And after ya’ll get Mr. Cole all fixed up, could you help me out: I’ve got a 2008 Chevy Tahoe with no AC, but I have a household AC window unit that will fit and I’d like to wire it into the Tahoe’s wiring harness. But I want to be able to detach it quickly so I can use it at home, too.
I can’t believe that the folks at Chevy don’t have a simple way of doing this…
burnspbesq
@J.W. Hamner:
He does want it to be sensibly organized. It’s just that his idea of sensible organization differs from anyone who works on iTunes.
different-church-lady
@burnspbesq: No, he means income that keeps pace with inflation. He just got distracted by shiny consumer trinkets for a second…
joeyess
@jncc:
<blockquote>And after ya’ll get Mr. Cole all fixed up, could you help me out: I’ve got a 2008 Chevy Tahoe with no AC, but I have a household AC window unit that will fit and I’d like to wire it into the Tahoe’s wiring harness. But I want to be able to detach it quickly so I can use it at home, too.
I can’t believe that the folks at Chevy don’t have a simple way of doing this…
AAAhahahahaahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa!!!!
Mark Kolmar
I realize that this advice doesn’t do exactly what you propose to do in iTunes, and I don’t use Mac. I tried once to bring several directory trees into an iTunes library with default settings, and iTunes sprayed much of that content into different places for my favorite bands such as “01” and “The”.
So I allow iTunes to manage a library of files that I downloaded through iTunes and the store. Maybe that’s improved. Still, it’s a major hazard if you try to rely on any kind of automatic sort for different file types from various sources. Make backups and run tests.
For general use, I run MediaMonkey on PC and navigate to the 3 or 4 locations that hold music. To try to maintain a library with a proper catalog, MediaMonkey also chokes on some files. Again this will work to the extent that your files are tagged correctly, that the player understands tags for that type of file, naming conventions, and other factors. If that covers the bulk of the files you want to organize, it might work out well enough for you. I don’t bother with shuffle mode very much, and that may be a significant concern for others. I find that at the bottom level, I have to keep directory trees with Artist/Album/Track, and navigate to those locations.
Files from various sources end up in different places for their own reasons — iTunes, podcasts you want to keep, podcasts you want to age off, hi-res FLACs, recently-purchased MP3s, old lousy Emusic files, ROIOs, and whatnot. Maybe it will be helpful to think of it this way, and just try to maintain a few libraries each with their own type of damage.
birthmarker
Take all pertinent equipment to the nearest Apple Store. Make an appointment first on line, which might be the hardest part. If it were me I would probably also take the suggestion of buying a new larger external drive with me, unopened, receipt kept in a safe place.
Let the nice young person at the Apple Store do it for you. If they balk due to “copyright” concerns, just have them tell you how to do it later at home.
I also found out that the semaphore looking thing at the upper mid right of the Itunes page allows you to pull your collection up by album, then you can batch delete the whole album. Helpful with duplicates.
Cris (without an H)
You sob uncontrollably.
Especially when it had not only music, but photos.
J.W. Hamner
@burnspbesq:
You’re right. It’s unfair of me to assume everyone would want all of their Pink Floyd albums in a folder called “Pink Floyd”. Who am I to judge if he’d rather have a couple in a folder called “Pudding” and a few more in a folder called “Salmon Mousse”?
birthmarker
PS It shouldn’t matter if your equipment is Apple or not, as long as you are using ITunes.
different-church-lady
This post is exclusively to close the damn tag that got left open.
EDIT: annnnd… it didn’t work. Let me check the source….
Eric k
Do you care if everything stays in th folders they are in now or just want them all on the external drive?
If you don’t care why not just link iTunes to a new it tunes folder on that drive by changing the iTunes preferences, then let iTunes move all he music to that folder creating a new folder structure organized by artist?
Bill E Pilgrim
@jncc: Er, well sort of but actually we’re talking about a basic configurable option built right in the customer interface in this case, and in fact, wanting to have a music player and the songs it plays on two different drives is not only nothing even remotely unreasonable to ask of a computer but such a basic function of them that I assumed that was the joke here.
More “Okay I can tune the car radio into certain stations, but is there some way to have it remember which ones I like so I can just push a button or something and go to them?” than the AC scenario, really.
different-church-lady
Another attempt.
EDIT: I give up. Cole, there’s a strong tag on #61 that ain’t closed.
RareSanity
@burnspbesq:
That is the trade-off isn’t it?
Either let the program handle it, the way that the program handles it. Or, accept all of the responsibility of trying to “trick” the program into handling it the way you want it to.
iTunes was designed to handle all of the tedium of managing large media libraries. Either you let it deal with the tedium, the way it was designed to, or you must handle the tedium.
You can’t tell it to handle 80% of the tedium and you handle the other 20%.
CarolDuhart
Winamp is your friend. Download, install. Then organize your music library to your taste using folders. Then go into Winamp and add to your Music Library. You do not have to move anything, Winamp recognizes it where it is, and will also play, create playlists, an html file on request, rename files and everything. The easiest, most hasslefree solution ever for just about everything except music tags.
Ripley
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
CarolDuhart
@Cris (without an H): I take mine to a very understanding tech. There are also programs that will help you retrieve data from a crashed external hard drive (I really know about this-for a long time my external hard drive sat on top of a hot computer box for way too long)
different-church-lady
@RareSanity: Why does all this suddenly remind me of a certain movie scene?
Cris (without an H)
Winamp does indeed rule, and I’ll confess that I didn’t know until just this minute that they had released a Mac version.
RareSanity
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Of a computer? No.
Of any specific piece of software? Not so much.
iTunes’ (and most Apple stuff) philosophy is basically, “if you want this to ‘just work’, then do it like this, and let me handle the rest. If you want to handle it, you’re on your own.”
This is a perfectly reasonable requirement on the part of a piece of software, that promises, a “simple to use” interface.
RareSanity
@different-church-lady:
Nailed it!
Bill E Pilgrim
@RareSanity: I think you misunderstood my point, though I’m not sure.
Nothing about this seems very complicated to me in terms of how computers work. The options to access the files and not make copies of them, or to specify whatever drive you want them to be accessed from, all of these are check boxes and etc right in the customer interface, in iTunes.
Which I was contrasting to wanting to redo your car in ways that aren’t configurable consumer options at all but rebuilding the whole thing to do something it was never meant to do.
Whether iTunes and Apple stuff in general is too fussy with all of the organizing files in a certain way for you and making copies before it does that and etc is sort of another issue IMO, and also I mean you can just turn all that off, as everyone was describing here.
Cris (without an H)
That’s why my iPod touch isn’t jailbroken. I’d rather just accept the default install and sacrifice some flexibility. I guess Richard Stallman is right about fools like me.
Maude
Why is everything in bold?
different-church-lady
@Maude: BECAUSE THERE’S AN OPEN STRONG TAG AT #61!
It’s like I gotta explain everything twice…
Roy G.
PEBKAC!
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-pebkac.htm
J.W. Hamner
@different-church-lady:
In Chrome the thread is fine… somewhat interestingly.
tBone
What @Martin said. Especially the last bit.
I fought iTunes for years because I insisted on keeping a folder structure I had set up manually. It was a huge pain in the ass and a waste of time. Just tell iTunes where you want to store your music with the “iTunes Media Folder location” preference, let it do its thing, and learn to use smart playlists. It will be much, much easier in the long run.
Irony Abounds
People are making this way too complicated. iTunes Library does not, in and of itself, holds files. Rather it is more like an information booth where iTunes is told where to look for files. Consequently, my guess is that all of your music is in either music 1 or music 2. Simply delete everything from your current iTunes library (Edit > Select All > Delete) followed by adding all of the files from music 1 and music 2 folders back to the iTunes library. You may want to go to Edit > Preference and change the location of the iTunes Media folder location to a location on the external HD if you want all of the song files to end up in a single place. In any event, what ever you do make sure that the music files are backed up on a different HD, whether its the Mac Mini or some other external HD and backup are done regularly.
I’m not sure why there is all the hate about iTunes. What do iTunes haters like to use?
Maude
@different-church-lady:
Could you explain it a third time? I missed the other 2.
Thx, in advance.
LOL
different-church-lady
@tBone: Y’know, the iTunes files structure isn’t really all that confusing.
Home > music > iTunes music > artist name > album name > file
Unlike iPhoto, which is utterly inscrutable.
RareSanity
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Ok, I did misunderstand.
I guess I would just be prone to say, there are only two reasons to use iTunes.
1. You don’t want to deal with organizing a large library.
2. You are using something (hardware, or software) that requires you to use iTunes.
If neither of those reasons applies to you, there are better options available. iTunes sucks as a standalone media manager .
different-church-lady
@RareSanity: Y’all have to keep in mind that iTunes is not primarilly intended to be a media manager — it’s first responsibility is to be the portal to the iTunes Store. The media manager stuff is just the marketing Trojan horse.
RareSanity
@Irony Abounds:
Depends on what function you are talking about. Media manager? Media player? Media acquisition?
It’s not that people are “hating” on iTunes, if you don’t stray from how it wants to be used, you will have no problems. Unfortunately, the slightest deviation, leads to heartburn. It is a software example of, “jack of all trades, master of none”.
CarolDuhart
@Cris (without an H): Winamp really does rule. I can actually use other radio services besides the ones listed by simply using downloaded files or entering a stream url. It handles podcasts very well. Not so great with video, but that’s not really its purpose. It can downsize to your toolbar either way, and is non-obtrusive.
You get most of your needs with the free edition, but if you need to burn a cd, you have to pay. You can always rip, though.
I have an old computer, so I am keeping all my music on an external hard drive-and have for years. Winamp works with it just fine. I actually prefer doing this because I don’t have to worry about this old computer taking my music with it.
tBone
I @different-church-lady:
I know. I just had trouble letting go of being in total control of how my files were managed. I got over it.
A tip I haven’t seen mentioned here yet: you can leave iTunes’ organizational features turned on and still add files/folders from any drive without having them copied into your iTunes media folder:
1) Select the files/folders you want to add in Finder or Windows Explorer
2) Hold down the option key and drag the files/folders into the iTunes window (not the dock icon).
3) Presto, the files are added to your iTunes library but aren’t copied into the iTunes media folder.
Comes in handy if (like me) you have a bunch of TV shows or other big video files that won’t all fit on whatever drive where you’re storing the rest of your media files.
Bill E Pilgrim
@RareSanity: Fair enough.
As far as why to use iTunes, I guess 3) is pretty much it for me, in terms of renting movies and transferring them to my iPhone to watch on the plane, plus buying songs now and then though not too often. Then 4) which is having gotten tired of having two libraries and just letting it all get Borged into iTunes eventually though I’m not even sure when that happened. Which I guess fits the Borg idea.
I really don’t find it very puzzling or complicated at all though, sort of in keeping with what Irony Abounds says up there. I vaguely remember that it seemed so when I first tried it and was used to using Winamp and just having files… meh. I think a lot of it is what people are used to.
birthmarker
@CarolDuhart: I noticed in the info WinAmp doesn’t support the ITouch. Do you know differently?
CarolDuhart
So far it doesn’t-but I’d keep checking back for changes with that one. Winamp doesn’t handle my phone very well, either. But I think that’s just a glitch for now. But external hard drives and mp3 players work just fine with Winamp for now.
RareSanity
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Both of your reasons fall under, “don’t want to organize a large library”. :-)
Or, more specifically, “don’t want to manage a large library”. Managing is organization and manipulation, e.g. converting videos to an iPhone format.
All of them are perfectly good reason to use iTunes. I do not see it as some sort of “technical weakness” to use iTunes, the way it was designed to be used. It saves a lot of headaches and frustration. Nothing wrong with that…
eemom
hey, can I horn in on Cole’s idiot action here even though I’m not a big important blogger like him?
How do I get my itunes library from my old Mac laptop to my new Mac laptop??
CarolDuhart
@birthmarker: Did a little googling:
http://mlipod.sourceforge.net/
Apparently there are some open source apps for this (use at own risk)
CarolDuhart
@eemom: Check for a file transfer program in your Mac. Connect with a special transfer ethernet cord. Or do what I did, buy an external hard drive large enough for your files and copy everything over to the external hard drive, then attach that hard drive to your computer and transfer to that computer. That’s the brute force way.
Bill E Pilgrim
@RareSanity: Oh well yeah, but you can leave “large” out of it, I don’t want to convert any movies to an iPhone format ;)
Though of course I do actually sometimes, if the movies came from anywhere other than iTunes and I want them on the phone.
Since the thread was about simply telling iTunes where to get the music files, I was assuming by “don’t want to organize a large library” you were referring to that somehow but now I see.
And just to underline, John here isn’t asking to use iTunes in any fancy way it wasn’t designed to be used, it’s all just configuration and pretty simple ones at that.
Jason
I concur that iTunes is a huge steaming pile of proprietary poo. I hate it and only use it to transfer MY MP3 files (not iTunes shitty m4p or whatever format) to the iPod I got as a gift. I hate DRM and everything associated with iTunes. I want control of my crap.
My biggest gripe with iTunes, besides the above, is that it’s too picky about where the music lives. There are step by step guides out there that work sometimes, but not always. That’s also a big gripe about apple stuff in general. You don’t have as much control over settings as a PC. So many times I want to go tweak something, and the options are just not there. It’s always band-aids, duct tape, and workarounds…
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Snark Based Reality:
Same here. We must be ancient…lol! I’m at the mercy of nobody and everything is in a format that I can do what I want with.
Of course, this requires a little skill to do. ;)
Very little.
FuzzyWuzzy
@J.W. Hamner: Problem is having different versions of the same music with the same titles, e.g. The Wall, The Wall Live in Berlin, The Wall 1979 bootleg, The Wall vinyl rip.
learning by doing is the mantra, though.
RareSanity
@eemom:
There is actually, a little promoted idea, that you can use your old Mac as an external hard drive.
If you turn your old Mac off, then hold F8, while turning it on, the “Firewire” symbol (looks kinda like a “Y”) appears on the screen, then your laptop is effectively an external hard drive.
All you need to do at that point, is get the correct Firewire cable, based on the vintage of each of the Macs involved, navigate your iTunes folder on the old Mac, and copy it over.
EDIT: Not sure of your level of “techie-ness”. Let me know, I can further explain any parts of this.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@jncc:
Get a good generator and bolt it in back. Knock out the back window, cut some plywood to fit it and cut the plywood out to mount the AC unit. That way you can just unplug it, pop it out and drag it back in the house.
Geez, a three year old could put that together! ;)
Oh, an option is to exhaust the generator out the back of the rig. Cut a hole in the plywood and put a tin smokestack in. That should work great and adds a homey look to the rig.
Martha Stewart would approve.
ETA: PC people can be pretty creative when they need to. :)
tBone
@Jason:
FYI: for music, iTunes has been DRM-free for several years. (Not so for TV and movies, but Apple’s hands are tied by the content industries there.) And if you do have some old DRMed m4p files (the “p” stands for “protected” – regular iTunes AAC files have an m4a extension), you can now redownload them, DRM-free, through the “Purchases” link in the iTunes Store.
Also, AAC files sound better than MP3s at the same bit rate because they use better compression algorithms, for what it’s worth.
Terminal. Learn it, use it, love it.
burnspbesq
@eemom:
This is easy.
Migration Assistant
eemom
@CarolDuhart:
@RareSanity:
thanks! I think y’all have given me enough to muddle through with.
eta: thanks to you too, burnsy. Gawd I love this blog.
burnspbesq
@RareSanity:
Target drive mode is great IF both computers have a FireWire port. Which rules it out for transferring files to a MacBook Air.
burnspbesq
@eemom:
What did you get?
For the new firm, I got a 11″ MacBook Air and put a 27″ Thunderbolt monitor in the office. Are teh awesome. ‘Tis good to have the ear of the IT purchasing manager.
RareSanity
@burnspbesq:
Never understood why someone would buy the MacBook Air.
Sure it’s thin, but it lacks too many features to warrant the price. For the same price, I can get a fully featured MacBook Pro, that is what, half an inch thicker?
I had a couple of friends buy one (against my advice, btw), only to return it and get a MacBook Pro. Setting up that, oh so satisfying, “I told you so”.
EDIT: But I see you bought one, so you obviously had a good reason that I respect. :-P
burnspbesq
@RareSanity:
I’m a lawyer. My needs are simple. If Office and Acrobat work, I’m good to go.
Alas, I sometimes have to work on airplanes, and I don’t always get upgraded to first class. Sometimes the person in front of me decides to crank their seat back. With anything bigger than an 11″ MacBook Air, when that happens, you’re fucked.
It’s a bad choice for a graphics professional or a gamer. I am neither of those.
Don’t compare it to a MacBook Pro. Compare it to a Hackintosh’ed Toshiba netbook. With a better display, a better keyboard, more battery life, and no software weirdness.
eemom
@burnspbesq:
I have a MacBook Pro which the hubster got for me. He wears the computers in the family.
At work of course, it’s the Dell shit. And I even have to drag the motherfucker home every night now because this document review software I need to use doesn’t run on a Mac. None of them do.
RareSanity
@burnspbesq:
I hate when this happens…seriously.
It’s funny how “accustomed” you get to first class once you get status on a airline. My wife calls me a travel snob now because I complain when I don’t get upgraded, or they didn’t have a meal if I was upgraded, or my bag doesn’t out of the baggage claim first.
I told her, “As many damn miles as I travel on that airline, they should be offering me ‘happy endings’ after every flight!”
She didn’t think that was funny, but she understood my point…
worn
@J.W. Hamner:
Unfair is not the right word. I think snotty is the better choice. But then again the internet is filled – more often on tech boards – with imperious folks whose knee jerk response to these sorts of questions is something akin to “I can’t conceive of why you might want to do things a certain way and therefore that way is stupid.”
In my case I run a mixed Windows and Mac environment. Sometimes when listening to my digital music I like to use iTunes and other times I like to use Foobar2000; each has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, sometimes I let the given media player run on shuffle and other times I want to play a specific song or small subset of songs. It is in the latter case where your logic falters. A case in point: there are occasions where I hear the song in my head but cannot remember the artist. Or perhaps the album. An Artist > Album file structure makes locating that unknown song difficult & time consuming at best.
So I have my music collection’s file structure organized in a way that makes the best conceptual sense to me. In fact, this structure predates my use of iTunes by many years.
For me the organization is by a loose idea of style and not simply a single, unfathomably long list of artists with album subfolders. And by style I don’t mean genre, though they are related. So the top level folders have titles like Pop & Rock, Country, Jazz, International, etc. Within some of these are more specific subfolders, like Brazilian within International, Western Swing within Country, etc. Within Pop & Rock there are so many files that I have the 1st set of subfolders organized by decades. At the deepest level you will find folders labeled as “Artist – Album”. But only for those albums where I have all the tracks (and there are plenty where I don’t nor want the complete album).
For me this works well (and has the advantage when using Foobar of being able to browse into my Pop & Rock > 1970’s folder, choose a handful of conceptually related songs and play them with a double click without going through the trouble of building a temporary playlist).
I don’t posit my system is better or worse than those employed by others. It simply works for me. The price is a little more management on the iTunes side, which is a price that to me is worth it. Others will disagree. And that’s cool.
Sometimes “one size fits all” really doesn’t.
J.W. Hamner
@worn:
Well, to avoid being called snotty again, let me venture in the most obsequious terms: if you have an idiosyncratic organizational scheme (that you simply cannot abandon) you should probably not use iTunes, or at least not grumble that Apple vehemently doesn’t want you to do it your own way.
Most people would simply use a search function to find songs they can’t recall all the details of… and make playlists to organize amorphous genres… but if doing it on the directory side works better for you, who am I to argue? There seem to be plenty of non-iTunes software out there that fit the bill nicely.
burnspbesq
@eemom:
You can run Windows on a Mac. Get a copy of Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion and a copy of Windows, then bribe your IT guy (with cookies, of course) to install all the Windows apps you need in the Windows partition on your MBP.
Or switch to Relativity, which is Web-based.
Ken
Linux.
Sorry, it’s a tech question, so someone has to say something about open source somewhere. :)
worn
@J.W. Hamner: I probably came off more punchy than I needed to. For that I apologize. I guess (what I thought to be) the tone of your response touched a nerve.
Fact is I’m tech savvy enough to where I don’t really have many issues in getting it all to work like I want it to, and across multiple platforms. And my “idiosyncratic” organizational system dovetails cleanly with the idiosyncrasies of my mind .
I use Foobar & iTunes pretty much equally. The only thing that’s a pain in the ass really is that I have manually add new music files to iTunes, instead of it automatically adding them to its ‘library’ as Foobar does via folder monitoring.
I’m no expert on what “most people” do but using playlists in the way you describe seems like too much overhead for certain circumstances.
But in your defense my grandmother accused me of always needing to do things the hard way.
matt
long ago, when I was working tech support for a product that has long since died, I got a call from an old coot who said he had a simple request. He had set up virtual drives on his windows machine from D:\ to V:\, one for each content type, and he wanted our app to respect his organizational scheme.
cole’s problem seems like one you could solve with simlinks.
MBunge
@different-church-lady: “@MBunge: CLOUD GOOD! MEATSPACE BAD! CLOUD GOOD! MEATSPACE BAD!”
Anyone who thinks the whole “cloud” concept isn’t going to lead to you getting massively screwed at some point in the future, raise your hands. Not so fast, my friends!
Mike
qkslvrwolf
Step 1: Get rid of itunes, it sucks.
Step 2: Get rid of mac, apple is evil. Even microsoft never sent swat teams to reclaim $400 equipment.
That probably wasn’t useful, but it sure felt good.
As long as I’m being annoying and posting shit that doesn’t matter, it’s not Mac vs PC. PC = Personal Computer != Windows Box. A mac is a PC. A windows box is a PC. A linux desktop or laptop is a PC.
Ok, I’m done being an ass, now.