200G iTunes Library on 128G MacBook Air?

[badlandz]

It’s looking fairly likely I might buy the new MacBook Air (with 128GB drive) as my primary (only) computer. Still worried about a couple things if I do. Can someone give me a quick rundown on what to expect if I try to keep my ~200GB music library in iTunes? It seems there are several ways it can be done, but I haven’t really seen anything that compares/contrasts the ways to do it and describes what would be best.

For example, if I just keep it all on a USB drive with my old netbook, I’ve had problems with that in the past. Like, I couldn’t let plugging in my iPhone spawn iTunes, because if iTunes ran without the USB drive plugged in, it just automatically reverted back to a different directory. Then all the app updates went to my C drive, and never the external. And I’d have to manually go back in and change the path to the external drive the next time I plugged it in.

I’ve heard that there was a block on using a NAS location as the default media directory in iTunes? Is that just rumor, or an old thing, or exist now?

Is the TimeCapsule anything special when it comes to this kind of thing? Or is it basically just a NAS drive, and won’t do anything different/better/magic when it comes to iTunes?

Or what about this cloud thing? It looks like a possible solution, but only for a very limited amount of storage space…

 

[-tWv-]

Well.. not sure how many songs that is, but google music has an upload limit of 20,000 songs. It'll take forever to upload them (well depending on your upload speed) but you can upload at least most of your music there if you want to. It's invitation only right now, so if you want to request one go to this page: http://music.google.com/

This won't keep the songs in iTunes though, so if you need to sync them to an iPod or something then you are going to need to put it on an external hard drive and then go into iTunes and change the location of your iTunes folder. Go to: Preferences> Advanced> iTunes Music Folder Location> Change... > Select folder

 

[badlandz]

...an external hard drive and then go into iTunes and change the location of your iTunes folder. Go to: Preferences> Advanced> iTunes Music Folder Location> Change... > Select folder

That's sort of part of my question. I know this can be set. But IF you do this, then shut down iTunes, then unplug the external drive, then go to school/work or whatever and restart the macbook without the external drive and start iTunes... What happens? Does it give an error message? Does it automatically change to a default directory (like I've seen older iTunes/WinXP do) which makes all app updates go download to the wrong directory? Does it just figure out some cool way to temporarily work, but not access what was on the external drive?

 

[badlandz]

Found out...

It's a nightmare!!!

So, I got my MacBook Air, love it as a computer. Then put my old windows iTunes library on an external drive, and started iTunes as per instructions and it found it, and imported it with play counts and all just fine.

Then, I was at school, without the hard drive, pluged in my iPhone, and it started iTunes. I closed it ASAP. Got home, put my hard drive on the MacBook Air, and started iTunes...

My apps were gone, plugged in my iPhone, it sorta freaked.

Then, noticed all my recent songs and things were gone. So I realized that somehow it pulled all the new stuff off my phone and put it on my local drive. So I had to RE-import new stuff (which it somehow deleted?) to the library.

Every single app it prompted me for "ignore or replace" on... And all the garageband stuff was gone again till the reimport.

Apparently, there's a trick to it that I haven't quite got. With iTunes running without the external drive, it defaults to the local drive. But when you plug it back in, it goes back to the preferred drive (external). But something happened to put a lot of stuff on the local drive taking up MacBook Air SDD space, and some stuff disappeared unless I re-imported.

It's sorta smart, didn't double things like my old NetBook experience. But it still hasn't got things quite right... I still had to delete stuff off the MacBook Air after re-import, and plugging my iPhone in to charge with the external drive off might be what started the mess. (set to auto-start iTunes, I think I have to turn that off and maybe it wil be OK)