iTunes 9 in Mountian Lion?

Now that my aging iMac is on its last legs, I'm in the market for a new Mac (I'm leaning new or refurbished Mac Pro) but a big worry for me is iTunes. Since 2001, I've built up a massive iTunes library of custom-made MP3s transferred from my vinyl and shellac collection (33, 45, and 78). In 12 years, I've put in more hours than I care to admit creating the files, tagging them, and attaching album art for every track. We're talking 55,000+ files here. For my purposes, iTunes 11 is totally unacceptable. I've tried it and hated it. iTunes 10 is manageable but it's missing some critical (to me) features present in iTunes 9. I realize that any Mac I purchase new now will ship with Mountain Lion and iTunes 11. With a new Mac, could I trash iTunes 11 right out of the box and install iTunes 9 in ML? Is it even compatible? I realize that running such an old version of iTunes would make it impossible to sync with the latest iPods, iPhones, etc., but that's fine -- I don't use them anyway. I just want a solid desktop-based iTunes experience that enables me to easily organize and access my MP3s. It's important enough to me that I'd even consider stepping back a few generations hardware-wise to get a 2010 Mac Pro and Snow Leopard if that's what it takes to get iTunes 9 compatibility, but I'd much prefer to get a newer machine if it's do-able.

Thanks so much! This terrific news has considerably brightened my day. It's difficult to explain, but I use iTunes not just as a music player on my computer, but as a database of my record collection. Album art is a big component of the database, as I add cover art and label scans for the records, sometimes attaching several images to a single MP3. In iTunes 10, it's impossible to toggle through multiple images in the album art viewer, and in iTunes 11, accessing the image(s) for each MP3 to add or simply view them is even more cumbersome. My collection it mostly pre-1950s 78 rpm records with one song per side, so the "album art" (i.e., record label scan) will be different for each track. The tiny thumbnail in iTunes 11 is a cruel joke -- why even have it if it's going to be so small? I realize it's possible to click and enlarge, but I really prefer to have the label scan visible and legible at a modest size in the lower corner as in iTunes 10 and before. Adding album art track-by-track is also much more clumsy in iTunes 11. (I can scan and attach label pics to 100 tracks in just under an hour with my scanner and iTunes 9 -- iTunes 11 would significantly slow that down.) I like iTunes 9 because it offers the most streamlined, efficient method for adding album art track-by-track, and the ability to easily toggle between multiple art files on a single MP3 is a huge plus. While I'm glad that iTunes 11 retains the ability to view the library in list views like earlier versions, the poor handling of album art -- in this case stripping away useful features rather than adding them -- really ruins it for me. iTunes 11 treats album art as a trivial decoration when for me it's an essential information-carrying component of the database. Thanks for showing me that I can get a new computer and still have the best of both worlds!

Thanks, cheekypaul! I've downloaded the iTunes 9.2.1 dmg file and the instructions you shared. Hopefully, swapping out iTunes 11 for 9 on the new computer will be relatively simple (no library to deal with). I'll follow the instructions linked in your post. I'm so glad this is possible. Many thanks for the response!