Advanced Itunes Library Storage

[6163621]

Hi...

Despite searching, I am obviously not using the right keywords

At work we have used ITUNES to store a very, very large selection of library CD music, sound effects and other production elements from our thousands of licensed CDs. Makes for easier monitoring and selection. HOWEVER ITUNES is growling at the weight of over 130,000 tracks.

Just opening this shared ITUNES library can bring ITUNES to a standstill for a long time on a giga network.

I had thought therefore we could split the library but ideally not splitting it onto many Macs as all the media filesa re on a several terrabyte server. Is there some form of "media server" (sorry don't know the word) that would allow us to effectively set up several instances of these ITUNES libraries so they could sit on a single (Linux) server and point to the same large media library, yet in shared libraries you would go to "server" sound effects, or "server" library music and the iike, resulting in faster loading times?

Thanks for any thoughts in advance.

 

[motulist]

From your description I'm not sure where you think the bottleneck is, but I'd guess that setting up a media server on the same existing gigabit network would not reduce your iTunes application launch time at all.

 

[zirkle2007]

Your post isn't very clear to me. See if this could help you out though. If you hold down Option while clicking iTunes, you can select the option of creating a new library. You could just make libraries for each genre or whatever. This would require you to restart iTunes to switch libraries, but it'd cut down on loading time.

 

[6163621]

Might be a language thing.

Loading smaller libraries goes fine. But when Itunes remote clients (even worse with Apple TV) have to load over 130,000 tracks into memory to give a listing remotely it takes an age.

And we don't need to see all 130,000, so it is no hassle to go to "sound effects" when one is needed. But trying to avoid to have several Macs just acting as Itunes servers.

D

 

[zirkle2007]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they are all stored on one server already, right? By creating the multiple iTunes libraries, you don't have to move the music, you just select what is place into the list that iTunes has open. You can set it so the libraries are off of the same server.

 

[motulist]

Here's a nifty idea that might work great, or be totally wacky.

You could keep one server setup as an iTunes server with its itunes application already open, then when people want to access the library you could make it so they just need to start screen sharing with the server! That way it'd only take a second for people to see the entirely library almost instantly! There are several huge downsides though. For instance, only 1 person would be able to have the itunes screen shared at any one moment, and if they forgot to end the screen sharing session then no one else would be able to get to the itunes shared screen.

 

[6163621]

Presently it sits on an Mac Mini which has an externally mounted RAID system with several TB on it for the media files.

So the Mac Mini Itunes has this mapped as its "local" (sic) library and in turn monitoring stations connect to this machine to preview material etc. So screen sharing is not viable as the machine is not in the same room.

So in theory I could have five Mac minis each with their own library (mounted on the external drive) and then at my own desk (for example) I could see the five different libraries. But am trying to cut down the number of machines possibly used (and unnecessary expense).

 

[motulist]

screen sharing works over the network.

 

[6163621]

But not for two people trying to do something at the same time, and does screen sharing have audio support anyway? (Not everyone is running Leopard..)