08-29-2009, 01:27 PM

I recently moved my music library onto an external drive to free up space. Now I've realized I want some of my music on my computer and some of it archived on the drive so that I can still have it somewhere in my library, but I won't have to deal with plugging the thing in for most of my music.

Trouble comes because itunes has a terrible way of managing removable media like this. In fact, it doesn't even try.

Currently: iTunes marks "missing" songs with an "!" when it tries to play them. Then I have to go back and play all !'d songs when I have the hard drive plugged in so that they're active again.

I'd rather: Songs that are in my archive (On the hard drive) are removed from my library completely when the drive is ejected. That way I only see a list of music that I can play right now. A way to move songs in and out of the archive would also be nice, so I can manage which songs are on my laptop and which are on the external drive easily.

is there anything that does this? Or would make this easier?

Thanks!
~Jordan

09-04-2009, 03:47 PM

I was being pretty smug (I thought) and went out and purchased a time capsule so I could plug my external usb drive into the usb slot on my time capsule thus not having to mount and unmount all the time but also giving the added advantage of having access to my entire library from anywhere in the house I may be using my laptop. The downside is that time capsule does not recognize it as a drive but rather a volume on the time capsule so there is no way I can have time machine back it up for me. I have not yet figured out how to overcome this one.