iTunes with new Airport Extreme (n) and two seperate music libraries

[xtophercaa]

I have a new 802.11N AirPort Extreme, to which I have connected a LaCie 500GB HD/USB hub. I have a 100GB library of music on this hard drive. The hard drive is an AirPort Disk through the AirPort Extreme.

I used the iTunes consolidate libary option to locate my music files to this AirPort Disk. In the folder just above the music files, I've placed the Album Artwork folder, the iTunes library .xml file, and the library .itl file. To establish this library, I held down OPTION while clicking on iTunes in my dock, then selected this Airport Disk library to open. This worked just fine.

However, I would like to manage a separate local library on my MacBook Pro's hard drive to keep music to listen to at work and my podcasts, etc. In the past, I was able to use the multiple library option to do this when I had my music on an external USB drive (not via Airport). I could select one or the other library, and iTunes would remember the location in Preferences > Advanced. I could switch libraries back and forth often, and iTunes would remember the library location.

This isn't the case anymore. When I establish iTunes to use the Airport Disk library, it works fine. When I try to switch to a local library, it still keeps the AirPort Disk location in Preferences. If I change it to local, then switch back to the Airport library, it keeps the local address in Preferences. Switching it back at that point requires a lengthy process where iTunes has to reindex the file locations presumably.

Another thing I've observed tonight is that I started in my local drive in iTunes tonight (checked Preferences > Advanced when I launched iTunes), and then I downloaded some podcasts and saw that they were being saved to the Airport Disk. I went back to Preferences and saw that the library location had changed (even though I didn't change it). Grrr! ***? Syncing 4 or 5 50 MB podcasts to my iPod via Wireless is not something I'd recommend anyone try--especially if you're trying to get out the door quickly.

Please help! This was totally unexpected. Being able to manage a local library is important to me (there are differences between the two, particularly podcasts--that I don't care to have in my "master" library on the Airport Disk).

 

[markw10]

The first part of your msg. was just as if I had written in. I am interested in a response to this as well. I'm relatively new to Mac (just around 3 months ago) and I have the Airport Extreme Base Station on order and as well plan to order a Western Digital MyBook 500GB USB2 Hard Drive for it. As well, I have the AppleTV on order. I know once I get the Apple TV I will be building up a large collection of video and obviously I don't want to take this on the go wherever I go or I won't have room for anything else on my laptop. Yet I travel frequently and want to have access to many mp3's and other files. My fiancee is also getting a laptop shortly so I want us to both be able to access this 'shared' drive at home and on the go we each have a much smaller collection on our laptops.
As well, this is probably not known yet but will the AppleTV be able to sync with the airport drive?
One last thing, where is the consolidate library option? I looked in ITunes and can't find it.