iTunes Library/File Management

[lukin]

Hello --

I just switched to Mac... a proud owner of a new MBP. I'm not exactly sure of the best way to manage some of my files so I could use some help.

On Vista, I had all my music in a folder, which I simply copied into iTunes. I also have a large number of live concerts that I keep separate from all my other music because when I hit random, I don't want every other song to be a live song from this band.

So to get around this on Vista, I put all this live music into another folder and copied the few concerts I wanted at a time into the iTunes library. When it was time to switch out concerts, I'd delete the old ones from the library, but leaving them in the separate folder.

Now that I'm on my MBP, I'm not sure how to manage this. I've been told all my music needs to go into the music folder...ok that makes sense, but then my iTunes catalog will have all this live music that I want separated out from my other music.

Can someone tell me how to manage this? New to this stuff so any help is appreciated!

Thanks

 

[swiftaw]

You can keep your music in whatever folder you want, just deselect the option to copy the music to your itunes folder when adding to library.

 

[lukin]

Thanks for the reply!

Follow up:

I put all my music into the Music folder. So now it looks like /Music/Artist/Album/song.mp3 for all my music.

After putting them in iTunes, I noticed an iTunes folder... which has a music folder that basically looks the same as my music folder.

Should I just put all of my music into the iTunes folder so there isn't the same file in 2 places? Or am I misunderstanding what it's doing. From what I think is happening, that same file above is also located in /Music/Itunes/Itunes Music/Artist/Album/song.mp3.

What's the best way to handle this?

Thanks

 

[BaldiMac]

The easiest way to handle this would be to simply drag all your music into iTunes. You can elect in the preferences to either leave all the files where they are or have iTunes copy them into the iTunes Music folder and organize them automatically.

Within iTunes, you can then tag all the live concerts in the genre or comments field with "Live Concert" or whatever. Then you can create a smart playlist with all music except those tagged with "Live Concert". Use this playlist whenever you want to listen to your random songs without the live stuff.