Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iPod Setting up a music server...

T

Ted Witcher

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 3, 2003
202
6
These are potentially stupid questions, so please bear that in mind. I'm setting up a music server using a mini and probably an external drive. This is a dedicated device; no need for other computing tasks. My question is, can iTunes read the songs from both an internal and an external drive (if the library of music is spread across both)? If not, and I choose to just put all of my music on an external drive (most likely), how do I set it up so that iTunes always rips music to and reads from this location, including all metadata?

Obviously this is all in Preferences, but the reason I'm asking is so I don't miss something really small -- a box that goes unchecked, some detail about metadata and ID tags and artwork and such that gets by me -- that seriously screws me up after I've ripped 800 CDs. I would like to get the loading process right the first time. Thanks in advance for the help.
 
balamw

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
Ted Witcher said:
can iTunes read the songs from both an internal and an external drive (if the library of music is spread across both)? If not, and I choose to just put all of my music on an external drive (most likely), how do I set it up so that iTunes always rips music to and reads from this location, including all metadata?
Click to expand...

Yes. Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library" and "Keep iTunes folder organized" and you can keep it your library on two drives. (Preferences->Advanced->General)

If you want your library to be all on the external drive, just change the library's location on that same tab, and keep the boxes checked so your music will default there. (IMHO preferable and much simpler). You could even go to the extreme of just making the external drive your boot drive and run the Mini off of that since the performance is generally improved that way.

NOTE: If all this machine is going to do is serve your music, and you're willing to hack a bit, you might just want to consider running a cheaper/smaller (though much less stylish) NSLU2 running mt-daap2 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/Mt-daapd
with a large external drive.

B
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom