I currently have a 250Gb external disk which plugs into my new 120Gb Mac Mini. On that disk I have a large collection of MP3s in a variety of standard folders, possibly up to 80Gb worth.
My questions are regarding iTunes - an app I tried to religiously avoid on the PC due to performance issues, and the fact I don't have an iPod!
If I add my existing songs to iTunes my understanding is that it will copy them all to the local drive and index them within the application. The problem is that this will then eat up most of my local disk, so probably wouldn't be a good idea. Alternatively, I can presumably host the iTunes database on the external drive although this seems overkill to make 2 copies of the files.
What would be my best strategy? Would it be to run using iTunes on an external drive and remove the originals? Is it possible to build an iTunes library without moving files around?
I would normally leave things as they are however iTunes seems to be so integral to everything on OSX (including, for example stuff like FrontRow), that leaving files outside this app would probably be counter-productive in the long run.
Which brings me to the second question area :
Does iTunes maintain the MP3 status of the files and can you get at them using from the filesystem (for example, if I wanted to read them with a PC) rather than having to always use iTunes?
Sorry to sound completely dense on this subject by the way! I'm sure there are some simple answers
Thanks in advance
My questions are regarding iTunes - an app I tried to religiously avoid on the PC due to performance issues, and the fact I don't have an iPod!
If I add my existing songs to iTunes my understanding is that it will copy them all to the local drive and index them within the application. The problem is that this will then eat up most of my local disk, so probably wouldn't be a good idea. Alternatively, I can presumably host the iTunes database on the external drive although this seems overkill to make 2 copies of the files.
What would be my best strategy? Would it be to run using iTunes on an external drive and remove the originals? Is it possible to build an iTunes library without moving files around?
I would normally leave things as they are however iTunes seems to be so integral to everything on OSX (including, for example stuff like FrontRow), that leaving files outside this app would probably be counter-productive in the long run.
Which brings me to the second question area :
Does iTunes maintain the MP3 status of the files and can you get at them using from the filesystem (for example, if I wanted to read them with a PC) rather than having to always use iTunes?
Sorry to sound completely dense on this subject by the way! I'm sure there are some simple answers
Thanks in advance