Killing two iTunes birds with one stone
Two things have been niggling me lately with iTunes, perhaps because I’m the kind of person who can’t stop fiddling with software.
Problem 1: reinstalling and reconfiguring iTunes is a pain
Man, all that scanning of the music folder. Then the recreation of playlists, and the hand-cranking of album art for the 20% or so albums which the iTunes Store doesn’t recognise. And, for a chap who re-installs Windows often, and fiddles around even more, it’s starting to be a pain in the bum.
Yes, there are ways to back-up the iTunes metadata (aka the “iTunes Library”), but who does that often? Who does it often enough?
Problem 2: iTunes resets the music folder location
My iTunes music folder is stored on a NAS box (the Kurobox), shared using Samba and mounted in Windows as a mapped drive. This is primarily for space reasons (20Gb of MP3s would be a lot for an ageing laptop), but also to have it all in a permanent place.
But there’s a problem: if I start iTunes before my wireless connection is established, then the mapped drive ain’t there – and iTunes helpfully resets the music folder location back to its default. Sure it can be manually changed back, but everything needs scanning afresh.
Killing two birds
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before: relocate the iTunes Library (the metadata) onto the mapped drive too. That would mean that I can re-install iTunes (or even Windows) at will and even access the same iTunes library from multiple Windows installations. (Virtual machines, etc).
This has the added benefit of curing problem 2 as well: if iTunes can’t find the library files at startup, then it pauses – meaning that it’ll never get as far as resetting the music folder location back to its default, giving me time to re-map the music drive.
But, while it’s easy to change the location of the music folder, relocating the library itself isn’t as obvious.
The trick
The trick is hold down <Shift> while iTunes starts. It’ll ask for the location of the iTunes library – set it to a location on the mapped drive (making sure you’ve moved it there first ;-).
Thanks to Lifehacker for this excellent iTunes tip! :-)
Postscript: my first attempt at solving this was to install Firefly Media Server onto the Kurobox, which acts like a shared iTunes library on the local network. This worked great until I tried to sync my iPhone against it: it can’t be done! iTunes insists that synching is only done with stuff in the local library.
Tags: iTunes, niggles, tech
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May 12th, 2009