Hi Ronni and other's here.
I have a similar but not identical predicament with my media management. I want the portability of my media so have to have an external drive to do that - a 500GB WD formatted to be Mac and Windows compatible. I have approx 200GB of music + more in movies,etc. I have iTunes on the various machines all mapped to the path relating to the external drive when it's connected. I have no music in the local iTunes predetermined C:\ location at all - this is only on Windows machines I might add. The concept works reasonably well. I just got an Apple tv this weekend - best $128 I've spent in a long time. It just works - brilliantly too - great intuitive interface and hugely increases the accessibility to my media. The kids love it too. My specific issue is I had to rebuild it all this weekend after a 'mate' at work moved one of the subfolders within my Music directory, when I couldn't find something after iTunes said "can't locate" I had to do a Windows search to locate the file then I uncovered what had been done. Moral - don't loan hard drives for others to copy your stuff without looking over their shoulder. Anyway. I could have maybe solved the problem a bit more elegantly but figured I'd uninstall iTunes (my Windows PC), clobber the itunes library files and then reinstall and do a fresh import of the root Music folder into iTunes. All going well and nicely settled. The problem I have now is during the "Determining Gapless Playback" it reaches a point part way through that where it says something like "register error, shutting the application down". SO it shuts down on its own. Then to continue using iTunes, I have to start it again and around a minute after starting again - it heads off to determine its gapless playback stuff again. Is there a way to immobilize the gapless exercise? I find no benefit with it anyway - for me at least though some might. Any thoughts welcomed. I'm looking to get a 27"imac shortly whereupon I will have (1TB) the media held on board so the portable will in effect be a back up of what's on the imac. Regards Pete. _____ From: wamug-ow...@wamug.org.au [mailto:wamug-ow...@wamug.org.au] On Behalf Of Ronda Brown Sent: Sunday, 13 February 2011 4:41 PM To: WAMUG Mailing List Subject: Re: iTunes 10.1.2 - file moving Hi Alan, Boy, you think like a 'Windows Person', you seem to like making hard work for yourself ;-) Macs make things easy, Apple Software Applications 'just work' and work well, without 'User Interference' . Once you set the Preferences for an Application it will do its job. OS X likes everything kept in its correct place, Applications in Applications, Documents in Documents, Movies in Movies, Music in Music (which also includes iTunes folder) & Pictures in Pictures. On 12/02/2011, at 4:53 PM, Alan Smith wrote: I am using iTunes 10.1.2 with OS 10.6.6. I want to make space on my iMac internal drive and ease the work load of Time Machine. What is the size of your internal hard drive? Might be worth getting a larger drive if you are worried about space. Your Time Machine Drive is 1TB ( I hope it is formatted correctly). i.e for Intel Machines - Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) & Partition Map Scheme: GUID Partition Table. If you require details how to do this I can send you my Tutorial "How To: Format & Partition External Drive for Time Machine". Question 1: Concept is to move the MOVIES component off iTunes to an external Firewire drive and NOT make automatic backups (but leave MUSIC internally with Time Machine backup). Is this possible with iTunes 10.1 with (or without) Home Sharing activated? NO . DON'T! Messing around inside the iTunes Music folder is not a smart thing to do. The first and most important point is that iTunes is designed to handle all of the details of the underlying file system for you. By design, the user manages their content through iTunes, and ideally you never need to even look at the underlying file system, much less worry about moving files around. The other most important point to keep in mind is that once a media file is listed in the iTunes library, it is referenced from iTunes by the specific location (ie, full pathname) of where this file is located. Therefore, if you move a file, iTunes will almost certainly lose track of that file, and the result will be a broken link in the iTunes library. This means that you cannot simply move your files manually to a new location and expect iTunes to find them after you've moved them, as it will still look for those files in their original locations. This one point alone has caused many users a great deal of grief, since repairing this situation can often be a tedious process of either manually adjusting the paths to hundreds of files or manually putting those files back into their original locations so that iTunes can find them again. Fortunately, if you understand this and use iTunes and its related tools the way they were designed, you can ensure a smooth migration of your iTunes library to an external hard drive or even a completely new computer with minimal problems. Generally, when trying to conserve disk space, the iTunes Media Folder is what most users will want to move, as it contains the bulk of your library. By comparison, the iTunes Library Database is much smaller and is usually best left in its default location. iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder: Note: If you move your music and media to an external hard drive, you will need to have that drive connected to access your files. No matter what, it's always a good idea to have a backup of the media you have in iTunes. <http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449> Question 2: Has iTunes 10.1 seized total control and moved ALL music and movies to its own folder system. If so, have only files on the internal drive been hijacked, or will files on external drives be moved as well? Nothing has been 'hijacked'. The iTunes Folder in your Username > Music > iTunes has an improved folder structure that if left alone works extremely well. (Evidence 1) I previously had a number of Apple and non-Apple video tutorials in a separate "Help Files and User Guides" folder (which now only contains PDF files). Previous version of iTunes (and OSX) recognised the video location but allowed them to be accessed by iTunes. (Music files not actually inside iTunes were similarly recognised but not moved.) Now Spotlight and iTunes "File - Get Info" data shows that ALL video files live in the -/music/itunes/itune-media/movies folder. And I can't locate a copy of the help videos anywhere else. iTunes File/Show-in-Finder doesn't actually give parent folder details. When you open iTunes.app PDFs would show in "Books", the Video Files would show in "Movies" under Library (if they were in a format iTunes can read). If you have a movie in your Home > Movies Folder (not your iTunes Movie Folder in 'Music') and you want to import / Add to your iTunes Library without it being moved from your Home > 'Movies Folder'. 1. Open iTunes.app 2. In iTunes go to 'File > Add to Library - in the resulting window locate the video in your Movies folder, highlight it and click "Choose". It will be added to your iTunes Library in Movies. It will still be located in its original position in your Home > Movies folder. It will also show in Home > Music > iTunes > iTunes Media > Movies iTunes 10: Automatically Add New Media To Your iTunes Library: in your Username > Music > iTunes folder. In the iTunes Folder > iTunes Media you will see a folder, "Automatically Add to iTunes". Any media that iTunes can read/playback that is copied to this folder will get added to your iTunes library when you open up iTunes. It will copy the files to the appropriate iTunes folders (ie mp4 = Movies, m4a = Music, etc). If you have an application that converts your movies or files to mp4 or m4v, you can have it output the files here and iTunes will import them for you. Perhaps you have torrented media files; you could also have your torrent application move your media files to this folder if you want to sync them to your iPhone/iPod/iPad. -With most video files, unless you modify the IDTAGS they will be defaulted to Movie as Media Kind. -Files in the "Automatically Add to iTunes" are removed and moved to the appropriate iTunes folder. -Opening iTunes seems to be the only way to trigger the import. -Sync your Recently Added playlist to your iPhone/iPad/iPod to automatically have the added media synced to your device. The "Help Files and User Guides" entry in Finder is permanently highlighted in orange and is located in the top Macintosh HD drive. (I don't recall it ever being coloured before upgrading to OS 10.6.6.) I probably created this folder. (Evidence 2) Last night I copied a DVD into the iMovie folder and later compressed it (.m4v). I moved this to an external Firewire drive, then used an iTune command to "associate" it so I could watch it via Apple TV. I probably used the File/Add-to-Library command, which seems to be only one available. iTunes made a copy of the movie which is now located in the iTunes folder structure. There seems to be no other way to get iTunes to recognise this file. See above for explanation. All this of course has increased the Time Machine (and Super Duper) backup complexity. Why? Both Time Machine and Super Duper will backup the iTunes Folder the same as it always has, if you are doing a complete System Backup. Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core i7 2.66GHz / 8GB / 1067 MHz DDR3 / 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200rpm OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) I skimmed the first 200 iTunes questions in Apple Support Discussions: a couple of people had similar but inconsistent problems with music files and say the problem started with iTunes ver 10.1.2 All very recent comments but no authoritative solutions. Can WAMUG shed any light on this problem (or my mis-operations)? Possible Solution: If the entire MOVIE section of iTunes can't be moved to an external drive, one pragmatic solution would be to move (copy and delete) all movies from iTunes to the external drive. Then turn off Time Machine whenever I want to work with movies. Then I could IMPORT (make a copy) an individual movie on a needs basis back to iTunes. (I was also proposing to move the working files from iMovie to an external drive: this concept was explored by Severin and Ronni a few days ago.) Regards, Alan Alan Smith iMac 21.5" Nov 2009 Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06 GHz / 4 MB OSX 10.6.6 Snow Leopard Time Machine in 1TB WD My Studio Firewire _____ -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au> No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3440 - Release Date: 02/12/11 19:34:00 -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
