J
jabroni5
Guest
Hi iTunes fans,
This post is for anyone who wants to backup (or "consolidate" -- the term used in the Advanced pull-down menu in iTunes) their iTunes music to a physical location other than the internal hard drive on their Mac. I, for one, own an iMac G4 which is nearly 4 years old now. Granted, four years shouldn't be greater than the lifespan of an industry-standard hard disk drive, but I see no reason not to be wary.
So here's what I did; I bought an external firewire hard drive. After plugging it in (ahh, shiny & new!! ), I "consolidated" my 20 gig music library to it from iTunes. This procedure worked great, except that the iTunes database file was still located on my original hard drive (in my UserID/Music/iTunes folder).
So here is where my question emerges...
My original hope was to make the Lacie drive kind of an independent iTunes source. When it's off, and I boot up my computer, iTunes can find no music library. When it's on, however, and I boot my computer, iTunes recognizes the iTunes library (as well as the database file), and lists my songs. Is this scenario possible?
From what I understand, the iTunes application maintains two files in the users folder for tracking playlist, rating, and play count information. These two files are "iTunes Library" (an iTunes Database file) and "iTunes Music Library.xml" and are stored in My_Hard_Drive/Users/my_user_name/Music/iTunes. These two files MUST be copied along with the primary music folder when it is moved to other computers, otherwise playlist, rating, and play count information will be lost. They must be manually copied to the users folder on the new computer (example: New_Computer_HD/Users/my_user_name/Music/iTunes).
So, if all that is correct, then shouldn't I be able to unplug my new firewire hard drive from my computer (without creating a bunch of "missing music file" error messages in iTunes while I'm gone), throw it in my backpack, and plug it into my neighbor's computer?
If anyone reading this forum could post a quick reply to let me know if I'm doing this correctly, I'd really appreciate it. The last thing I want is to make my iTunes database corrupt or unusable!
Thanks in advance for help w/ this!! :batman:
-jabroni5
This post is for anyone who wants to backup (or "consolidate" -- the term used in the Advanced pull-down menu in iTunes) their iTunes music to a physical location other than the internal hard drive on their Mac. I, for one, own an iMac G4 which is nearly 4 years old now. Granted, four years shouldn't be greater than the lifespan of an industry-standard hard disk drive, but I see no reason not to be wary.
So here's what I did; I bought an external firewire hard drive. After plugging it in (ahh, shiny & new!! ), I "consolidated" my 20 gig music library to it from iTunes. This procedure worked great, except that the iTunes database file was still located on my original hard drive (in my UserID/Music/iTunes folder).
So here is where my question emerges...
My original hope was to make the Lacie drive kind of an independent iTunes source. When it's off, and I boot up my computer, iTunes can find no music library. When it's on, however, and I boot my computer, iTunes recognizes the iTunes library (as well as the database file), and lists my songs. Is this scenario possible?
From what I understand, the iTunes application maintains two files in the users folder for tracking playlist, rating, and play count information. These two files are "iTunes Library" (an iTunes Database file) and "iTunes Music Library.xml" and are stored in My_Hard_Drive/Users/my_user_name/Music/iTunes. These two files MUST be copied along with the primary music folder when it is moved to other computers, otherwise playlist, rating, and play count information will be lost. They must be manually copied to the users folder on the new computer (example: New_Computer_HD/Users/my_user_name/Music/iTunes).
So, if all that is correct, then shouldn't I be able to unplug my new firewire hard drive from my computer (without creating a bunch of "missing music file" error messages in iTunes while I'm gone), throw it in my backpack, and plug it into my neighbor's computer?
If anyone reading this forum could post a quick reply to let me know if I'm doing this correctly, I'd really appreciate it. The last thing I want is to make my iTunes database corrupt or unusable!
Thanks in advance for help w/ this!! :batman:
-jabroni5