Should I have a second iTunes library?

I saw similar posts but nothing quite on the money, so hope I'm not being redundant.

My goal is to put my entire music library (about 1000 CDs) onto an external drive. I'd like to access it from my MBP while at home and plugged in, but still be able to drag some music onto the laptop manually for when I'm on the go.

What I have done is created a second iTunes library called MASTER on the external. I've been ripping to it. What happens is I have to command-click on iTunes when I open it and select the MASTER library from the drive. But I'm wondering if this is a mistake.

Can I (and am I better off) having one library on the MBP and having the music rip to the location of the external? So in other words, the external becomes a folder location and not a second library? I'm concerned that this may cause problems down the line with managing my iPhone through iTunes. I've only ripped a couple GB of music so it's not too late to change something or start over. Could really use some advice.

* I should note all of my apps are saved on the MBP hard drive. So syncing and managing those with iPhone would have to be on the laptop itself.

Many thanks.

To be honest having two version of your library is smart because you're backuping important data. So do it whatever happens.

I actually had a similar problem to yours and to solve it I bought a very slim travel friendly drive, so I don't need to worry about several libraries. I just have a backup on a second drive and I have my music with me at all times.

I keep all of my media (audio/video) on a NAS that is mounted into my iMac. I have a single library that then points to the network store for all the media files. This works great since my media backed up and not taking up space on my iMac. Additionally, my NAS has the capability of broadcasting music on it's own so I don't need to have iTunes do that for me from the iMac.

However, without the mounted network driver (or external drive in your case), your library will have no music to play with, so when you are on the go and don't have the external drive with you, you'll have no music.

To that end, it probably makes sense for you to have your MASTER library that has all of your media on the external drive, then when you intend to be on the go, create a new library and drag just the songs you want. Once you're done with that you can remove the songs and the newly created library and go back to using MASTER..

Regards

Raz0rEdge said:

To that end, it probably makes sense for you to have your MASTER library that has all of your media on the external drive, then when you intend to be on the go, create a new library and drag just the songs you want. Once you're done with that you can remove the songs and the newly created library and go back to using MASTER..

Regards

Click to expand...

I think it's probably the way to go. I'll just have to manually move music onto the laptop, not just to play from there but to manage on my iphone.

Another question...will having this second library cause any usage issues with songs purchased on iTunes?

I'm pretty sure iTunes songs are DRM-free, so having them in multiple libraries should be fine.

Regards