Content on external drive

[rctneil]

Hey,

My setup is currently:

iMac with a 3Tb external drive. The external drive stores my iTunes Media folder.

I'm looking at replacing the iMac with a new MacBook Pro 512Gb. - I know I can't store my library on the internal drive.

I have iTunes Match.

I know that when I have the external drive connected to the MacBook Pro then everything will be great but my question is that when I take my MacBook Pro away and it is disconnected from the drive will iTunes be smart enough to play the version of songs on iTunes Match rather than the 320kbps versions stored on my external drive as those won't be accessible until I get home and reconnect it.

I'm basically trying to look at everything I store on my external drive and figure out what will happen in the scenario where I have my machine but the external drive is not accessible.

How do people deal with this situation?

Thanks,
Neil

 

[Fishrrman]

Unrelated response:

Do you value those music files on the external drive?

If so, are they backed up anywhere…?

 

[rctneil]

Unrelated response:

Do you value those music files on the external drive?

If so, are they backed up anywhere…?

Hey, Yes, I do value them and yes they are backed up. I have a secondary 3Tb drive. The main external drive auto backs up to the second and also all content is backed up to the cloud with CrashPlan.

Is that ok?

 

[rctneil]

Any help with this?

 

[BrianBaughn]

I'd like to know what will happen, too. I'm thinking it will be trouble.

Because the "matching" mechanism of AM is so wonky I bailed on having better quality files. Unless AM doesn't have the song or album, the actual song file doesn't reside in my iTunes library...just the cloud version. This is one direction you could go.

Another would be a second user account (for travel) that is logged into the same AM account...with file sharing set up between the accounts.

Not perfect solutions!