music mgmt, iTunes, external drive, multiple iPods..... oy vey. Help?

[remytherestless]

new member to the forum with a difficult scenario... hopefully you can help?

i have about 40GBs of music in my macbook pro's iTunes, plus another 80GBs in a 500GB external hard drive, and unfortunately in a few different folders as well.

a good portion of the music i have has been pulled from friends' ipods using "Senuti": http://www.fadingred.org/senuti/

i'm having trouble figuring out how to manage the music on my mac and on my external drive, especially when i have different albums by the same band in different folders.

the space on my mac's HD is too small to manage my entire collection of music, and i foresee expanding that collection as i travel and pull music from friends' collections and ipods as well.

is it possible to run a separate iTunes program on my external drive to manage my entire library, and to run an iTunes on my mac to manage my ipods?

does anyone here have the same scenario and has figured out a way to deal with it?

please help!

 

[remytherestless]

addendum

ok, so reading through a bunch of other posts, i came up with a plan. please shoot holes in it before i try it if you know this is a bad idea....

it looks like i should back-up all of my music files onto my external drive, then DELETE my iTunes library.

i should then create a NEW iTunes library on my external HD and put all of the various music files and folders into it, using iTunes on my mac to manage and consolidate it.

i should then create a second iTunes library (holding "option" when i click on iTunes to open it) on my mac and copy the now-merged folders over from the external HD that i want to carry with me and put on my ipods.

does that make sense? INPUT PLEEEEEEASE?!

 

[baggss]

That is a good option to do what you want. Just make sure you name the second iTunes Library something other than the name of the first one. You will need to be able to find it when you want to load it.

What might be easier is to simply keep the music you want access to all the time on your iPods and then just keep any newly "acquired" music on your Mac until you can merge it with your main library. This is actually what I do and find it works out well while leaving plenty of open space on my iBook.

On a side note, this forum frowns upon swapping/trading music and anything that could be construed as a copyright violation.

Illegal Activity: We choose to follow United States law in regard to what is permissible to be discussed here. Therefore discussion of illegal file sharing, cracked programs, requests for serial numbers, and any other breaches of copyright or other illegal activity are not allowed in these forums.

Just a heads up.

 

[remytherestless]

ah, right. sometimes its easy to forget that the US legal system/recording industry forbids sharing with friends.

i'm knee-deep in giving this a shot. all music's been backed up, library's been deleted, new ones created, and i've just started to load the first new library, 400 songs at a time.

wish me luck!

 

[tootallUK]

I shifted all my iTunes library to an external 100GB drive (small and pocket-size, so can carry it easily with my iBook) and now I only need to have it plugged in when I open iTunes...

since my iPod is 80GB and only 3/4 full, the external drive is essentially a back-up...

though the iBook AND external iTunes library are also backed up on a 250GB Maxtor external drive which stays at home - too darn big to carry

seems to work well enough