Storage solutions for music library?

64 gb sd card...

of that 1 tb of music...odds are you only hear 5% of it all over a relatively longer period of time...

flash prices being what they are, you have no choice in the matter either

Load your itunes library on an external or network drive?

i only suggested an sd card because they are the only alternative, keeping portability in mind...

the external hd is certainly not

larger capacity sd cards are coming soonish ...

fair enough..but 768gb ssd for over 1K compared to the platter 1tb drive that cost ~40 is a big difference...

You can move a portion of you stuff (say the less frequent listen tracks) to Google Music. Assume you have an internet connection in most of the places so that's basically available with a click of a button.
I myself just migrated some 10000 tracks to Google music (supports up to 20000 tracks free of charge) which allowed me to free huge space ... of course I still keep a copy on my NAS but now with their new iOS client this options becomes even more handy !

what's your budget?
What kind of space are you talking about?

I recently made myself a Synology NAS device.

4 bay box, 4 2-tb drives, ups. total cost ~$1200

i am playing around with volume sizes but right now i've got it in RAID 10 which gives me 4tb usable space (plust 4tb redundancy).

at work i use RAID 5 which would give me an extra 2tb of space but so far I like the improved speeds of the RAID 1+0.

Since i have it hardwired into my network the speeds are amazing. I can watch highdef movies right off of it over wifi so you should have 0 trouble streaming your music.

plus every device in the house has access to it - even remotely.

Plus, the fear of losing my array made me spend the money on the UPS (which of course i should have done anyway) but now if the power goes out we still have a few hours of internet which is nice... especially with the frozen tundra we call America these past few days causing trees to knock out power lines all over the place.

Itunes home sharing might also be useful. Leave your current MacBook set up as a file server, and use home sharing to copy a smaller subset of your library to the Air.

If you are not the boss, I'd be thinking spending that much time on my music at work would get me into trouble soon.

If you are the boss, I'd investigate some sort of synching (via the Internet) between your home's library and your work's library, then your library can be as big as they need be wo being constrained by a laptop.

if no budget constraints then maybe this :
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Data...e=UTF8&qid=1389275252&sr=8-13&keywords=usb+1t

gdourado said:

Hello,
Thank you all for your sugestions.
I would like to avoid the hassle of running multiple libraries, but if I have to, can I do it? Have more than one itunes library on the same computer?

Let's say this.
I have an external HDD with all my music. I create an iTunes library where it uses the external HDD as the media location.
Then, I copy some albuns to the MBA internal SSD. Can I create a total different media library on Itunes?
And when I rip a new cd, I copy it and tag it on the external HDD library.
Than, if I want to, copy it to the other librabry?

Also, how does iTunes Homesharing work? The server has one iTunes Library with all the music. Then, I copy albuns to the MBA, and the iTunes on the MBA will have a library with only the local tracks?

Cheers and thanks!

Click to expand...

I think the program Tunespan sounds like it could help you out for having multiple itunes libraries. I have used it a little bit but by no means am I a power user so maybe someone else can chime in and help you out.

http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/

Or similar. I just bought a Seagate portable HD for this very reason.

gdourado said:

Do you have a wireless external HDD? How does that work out?

Cheers!

Click to expand...

No, it's not wireless. It's small and light enough to fit in a small pocket on my backpack. When I want to update my library I just pull it out and plug it in through the USB.

BTW, I also have a very large library, but not as large as yours, and it would fit entirely on my 512GB MacAir. It would leave very little room though. I decided to just use the portable hard drive. They're very affordable these days.

gdourado said:

I am going to move my library to the drive and see how it works on a day to day basis.

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Here's how.

Boyd01 said:

My point was that 64gb is a far cry from 600gb, and I don't think anything near that size is coming. Also, we're talking about 80MB/s transfer from a card vs 700MB/s from the SSD ...

Click to expand...

Why would anyone need such read speed for playing music files?

gdourado said:

Bought a WD elements 2tb USB 3.0 2.5inch HDD.
I am going to move my library to the drive and see how it works on a day to day basis.

Cheers!

Click to expand...

The USB 3.0 is extremely fast BTW. I was able to transfer 320GB is about five hours IIRC.