iTune Music folder - 50GB!

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So I noticed that my hard drive is almost full to the brim and 50GB (a third of available space) is taken up with iTunes music.

With the average MP3 file being 4MB and after 6 years or more of downloading music it is easy to get to this point.

If anyone has had similar experiences what did you do? I have about 150GB of hard drive, which I am told is the max for my MacBook Pro.
 
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Buy an external HD, and transfer your iTunes library to there. You can then keep adding to it (600GB and counting here...)
 

chscag

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One option is to move your iTunes library to an external hard drive. The other is obvious: buy a larger faster hard drive for your Mac.

How to move iTunes to an external hard drive. LINK
 

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having an external hard drive for music is really irritating, especially on a laptop! if you must put it on one, make sure you get a bus powered one.

otherwise, at a loss of quality, you could reencode your music at a lower bitrate.

have a look through your library, if there is any uncompressed files, i.e WAVs or AIFFs, you can encode them to AAC or MP3 to trim about 20-30mb off the file size.

every little bit helps. :)
 

Slydude

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Putting your music on an external drive is a good idea. If you think you will forget to connect the drive that can be managed relatively easily. I have an Automator workflow that attempts to mount the external drive and then launches iTunes afterward.

I am not a big fan of bus powered hard drives. If I am not mistaken a search of this forum will result in numerous posts from members having problems with this arrangement. even with the drive connected to two USB ports there is sometimes a problem.

BTW have you considered keeping a portion of your music on the internal drive for portability and then moving the library to an external drive. It's easy to switch between the two libraries.
 
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having an external hard drive for music is really irritating, especially on a laptop! if you must put it on one, make sure you get a bus powered one.

otherwise, at a loss of quality, you could reencode your music at a lower bitrate.

have a look through your library, if there is any uncompressed files, i.e WAVs or AIFFs, you can encode them to AAC or MP3 to trim about 20-30mb off the file size.

every little bit helps. :)


I disagree here, as Sly said, this causes issues. Keep the music on a powered HD, and have a separate library on your laptop, or stream to it from your network if using it at home.
 

robduckyworth


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fair points, however i have never had a problem with a bus powered, it helps to stay portable really. i do keep my desktops music on an external that is powered however. :)
 
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chas_m

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A different approach, just to be different: throw away all the music in that collection you don't really like or listen to.

That should whittle it down to about 1/5th its current size if my experience with others is any indication ...
 
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A different approach, just to be different: throw away all the music in that collection you don't really like or listen to.

That should whittle it down to about 1/5th its current size if my experience with others is any indication ...

If he bought the songs from iTunes that is like throwing money in the trash..
 

bobtomay

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Anything purchased that you don't like or don't use, the money was thrown away at the time of purchase, not at the time you actually get rid of it.
 
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Thanks everyone. External hard drive it is then. I have a lacie drive which I use to regularly backup work. I wonder if I can use this same drive to transfer the itunes library on to or will that muck up the back up? I am using time machine for this.
 
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Thanks everyone. External hard drive it is then. I have a lacie drive which I use to regularly backup work. I wonder if I can use this same drive to transfer the itunes library on to or will that muck up the back up? I am using time machine for this.

As long as it's big enough, you can partition it and have half for TM and half for your music.
Of course, TM will be backing up what's in your music folder now, but if you move it it won't be able to as it will be on the same HD.
 

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