Posts Tagged ‘tech’

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.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : May 12th, 2009