How to handle multiple iTunes libraries.

March 21, 2005 12:02 PM

We have four computers that we want to keep music on, but the collection is too big to just copy the whole library everywhere. What are our options?

Computers are an apple desktop, a windows PC, a powerbook and an ibook. Ideally, we'd like all the music available on the desktops, and for the laptops to get the contents of some smart playlists (a few gigs of recently added, a few more of recently played, and then a few random ones to round it out).

We don't care about the accuracy of the parent collection's playcount/last played/etc data. Can this be done? If not, does anybody have any useful alternatives?

posted by mosch to computers & internet (10 comments total)

iTunes sharing would be the easiest way to set this up. But since the last played date and play count don't get updated on the server when a song is played from a client, you won't be able to have a playlist like "recently played." I don't know of a way to do this, in fact, short of perhaps writing a proxy app for iTunes sharing that watches what songs are being played by clients and updates the last-played and play-count fields.
posted by kindall at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2005

Are the computers networked together? I have been thinking about getting one of these for my music library.
posted by matildaben at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2005

We're not looking for a network-based solution.

While everything is in-house, it's all very easy. The problem is that we want music physically on the laptops, so when we travel we have some stuff with us.
posted by mosch at 12:21 PM on March 21, 2005

Buy a big external drive with a USB connection (Note: must have USB 2.0 on the laptops, or spring for a 2.0 PC card). You can find 250GB for under $200 after rebate these days.

Another useful music traveller idea is to buy 2.5" laptop HD enclosures that take a laptop HD and connect via USB. About the size of a deck of cards, and you can take 20-60+GB on them for playing on any laptop, without having to copy all the music to each laptop each time. You may even have some extra drives around, given all the laptops. The cases go for ~$20.
posted by true at 12:29 PM on March 21, 2005

DVD Burners are extremely cheap these days.
posted by ori at 12:49 PM on March 21, 2005

So you want everyone to have a local copy of the files for travelling but the collection is too big to just copy the library everywhere?

Er...

I'm assuming that a DVD wouldn't hold enough, a collection that's too big to have everywhere is larger than 4-8G.

So your options are to add more storage (external harddrives), or make it remote (network), or reduce the size of the files (re-encode at a lower bitrate).
posted by holloway at 2:04 PM on March 21, 2005

Yeah, if you want a non-network solution, I'd go with DVDs. They should be good for 40-50 hours of music each, and if you need more than that on a trip, you're spending too much time traveling.

Or, you know, an iPod.
posted by kindall at 2:54 PM on March 21, 2005

At my place the music is centrally located on the hard drive of one machine, that is always on. We'll call it the server, although I call it Miles.

All the other machines in the house (Monk, Herbie, Cannonball) have their own instance of iTunes running, pointing to the collection on the server (the drive in question is shared). This allows them to have more or less the same music collection, while still being unique to the users of those respective machines, which sometimes have a bit of music on them as well. Works great. If you have 4 machines already, I can't imagine why you'd want to spend more money on hardware.
posted by furtive at 4:45 PM on March 21, 2005

We were looking for something that would treat the powerbook and ibook in the same way that iTunes normally treats an iPod. (making it easy to sync specified playlists, without copying the whole library, or requiring a huge amount of portable storage space.)

So far #mefi was the source of the best answer (write a tool that parses the iTunes Music Library xml file, and copies over the relevant playlists/music files to the notebooks). Unfortunately, I'm way too lazy to do that, and nobody seems to have a ready-made tool available for $19.95.
posted by mosch at 5:16 PM on March 21, 2005

Mosch: check out my solution.
posted by adamrice at 9:08 PM on March 21, 2005