iTunes limitations?

alra111

alra111

Registered
Greetings,

What happens when the drive on which your iTunes library sits fills up? Is there a way to tell iTunes that your library takes up more than one drive, and two consider the contents of two or more hard drives as one single library?

Thanks,
Alra111
 
When your hard drive will start to be too full to function properly (less than 15 % free space), it will have odd symptoms, have applications crash, preferences and data be lost etc.
When the space gets fatally too little (a few hundred MB free), you'll get warnings about the missing space.
If you ignore even those warnings... if this is your boot drive, your Mac will shut down and not start up until you have removed enough space for it to function. With command line.

iTunes can have one library. If you have too much music to fit that hard drive, consider buying a bigger one, or set up a RAID with the other hard drive and place the music folder on the RAID volume.
 
So in other words, Giaguara, are you saying that my iTunes library can never get too big without iTunes being the very least of my worries? Neat perspective and something I can grasp, thanks!
 
You don't need to put your music in your iTunes Library folder. You can put it anywhere you want, as long as you disable iTunes' "keep music folder organized" and "copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" options (in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced).

So you can spread your collection over as many disks and folders as you want, organized any way you want.


Edit: If you're hellbent on letting iTunes keep using its automatic organization, you could rig it up by using symbolic links or aliases in your iTunes Music folder that point to folders on other disks. I forget whether you need to use symbolic links or aliases for this to work, but I know that it can work, because I've done it before.
 
Mikuro said:
You don't need to put your music in your iTunes Library folder. You can put it anywhere you want, as long as you disable iTunes' "keep music folder organized" and "copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" options (in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced).

So you can spread your collection over as many disks and folders as you want, organized any way you want.


Edit: If you're hellbent on letting iTunes keep using its automatic organization, you could rig it up by using symbolic links or aliases in your iTunes Music folder that point to folders on other disks. I forget whether you need to use symbolic links or aliases for this to work, but I know that it can work, because I've done it before.
Click to expand...

Thanks, so there is hope!!
 
Mikuro's suggestion probably will work the best for you in this case.
Just if iTunes will not be organizing the music automatically, keep in mind that if you manually move some of your music from Finder, you'll have to tell iTunes where those files are kept now... maybe giving a color label (like red or green) in Finder will make it easier to see that those folders contents should be kept where they are. That way you could have your old music where it is now, and new on some other hard drive or folder.
 
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