Off-loading iTunes 'data'..

[farmcock]

I have somehow built a large iTunes library of not only music, but mainly audiobooks and movies to where my HDD only has about 42gb of space left out of 250gb.

I have a 250gb Lacie external but want to devote that to 'Time machine' whenever Leopard comes out and am currently using it to backup my home folder.

What would be the best method to 'off-load' some of the movies and some of the audiobooks so that i could pull one back into iTunes if I wanted to listen/view it from time to time?

I would like to keep a select few movies/books on the main computer at all times, but not necessarily the entire library as I still would like to load on Windows XP at some point and partition part of the drive for it.

 

[djames42]

If you want to store it "on-line" (i.e. on an external drive), you can tell iTunes to not manage your music. You can then move your movies+audiobooks to another drive, add them back to your iTunes library, and they'll be available to you, just not in your ~/Music folder.

...but since you say you want to keep your external drive for backups/time machine, you can simply create playlists containing the items you want to burn to DVD media. I believe that iTunes will allow spanning (meaning you can burn your entire playlist even if it takes multiple disks), but I'm not sure.

The great thing about using iTunes to back up your media is that the metadata is saved along with the files: when you insert your DVD, iTunes will recognise it and it will show up in iTunes just as it did before, complete with any ratings, last played and number of times played (although obviously this information will not be updated going forward).