RMBP iTunes question

[Callumbear845]

I am about to receive my retina MBP, specs in signature, and I have a dilemma I don't know how to solve. I have an iTunes library composed of about 20GB of music and 800GB of movies and TV shows, mostly ripped off of DVD's. I have a portable external USB 3.0 1.5 TB HDD. I want to have my music on the MBP so I can listen to it anytime, but the videos on the external Drive because they won't fit on the internal. That, I can probably figure out how to do. My real question is how to trick iTunes into moving any movies or TV shows I buy through iTunes to the external drive and all the music to the internal SSD.
Has anyone run into a similar problem or have a solution?

 

[striker33]

I am about to receive my retina MBP, specs in signature, and I have a dilemma I don't know how to solve. I have an iTunes library composed of about 20GB of music and 800GB of movies and TV shows, mostly ripped off of DVD's. I have a portable external USB 3.0 1.5 TB HDD. I want to have my music on the MBP so I can listen to it anytime, but the videos on the external Drive because they won't fit on the internal. That, I can probably figure out how to do. My real question is how to trick iTunes into moving any movies or TV shows I buy through iTunes to the external drive and all the music to the internal SSD.
Has anyone run into a similar problem or have a solution?

I'm fairly certain you can set your external drive as the main iTunes folder, then simply set the preferences so that Music is not organized or copied to that folder when imported into iTunes, so it will be kept in whichever folder it was originally in locally.

 

[GGJstudios]

I am about to receive my retina MBP, specs in signature, and I have a dilemma I don't know how to solve. I have an iTunes library composed of about 20GB of music and 800GB of movies and TV shows, mostly ripped off of DVD's. I have a portable external USB 3.0 1.5 TB HDD. I want to have my music on the MBP so I can listen to it anytime, but the videos on the external Drive because they won't fit on the internal. That, I can probably figure out how to do. My real question is how to trick iTunes into moving any movies or TV shows I buy through iTunes to the external drive and all the music to the internal SSD.
Has anyone run into a similar problem or have a solution?

You can split your iTunes library, so some of the content is on your internal drive and available when you're mobile, with the remainder on an external drive. However, you can't specify that iTunes automatically downloads to different locations, based on media type.

How to split a single iTunes library over two or more media locations

 

[Kaemon]

What I would recomend is just getting itunes match for the music, and the video's will also be avalible to stream directly through itunes if you bought them there as well... Thats what I'll be doing. That way none of its ever on my computer, but accessable at all times.

At least my experiance on my iphone has lead me to belive I can do it with Video as well.

 

[ZipZap]

if you only want to add files to iTunes without copying the files to your media folder you can press and hold the Option + Command (Alt + Apple) keys while dragging the files onto itunes.

Therefore, put some of your media whereever you want.

 

[chrisperro]

What I would recomend is just getting itunes match for the music, and the video's will also be avalible to stream directly through itunes if you bought them there as well... Thats what I'll be doing. That way none of its ever on my computer, but accessable at all times.

At least my experiance on my iphone has lead me to belive I can do it with Video as well.

yea but you need an internet connection at all times for this tho.

 

[imMango]

I was in a similar situation to you (as I'm sure most people are nowadays) where I wanted to store all my HD video on an external but keep my music on the Mac HDD. What I did was essentially create another iTunes library on my external and put my videos on there. Whenever I'm downloading new videos from the iTunes store I make sure that iTunes is pointed forwards my library on the external. Whenever I'm adding music, I just switch it back. You can keep the checkbox for iTunes to organize your library doing it this way as well.

If your just watching videos or listening to music, or even syncing to devices, it doesn'tatter which library is selected, as iTunes will play sync all media just fine (as long as the external is connected).

The whole thing is annoying but thats just the way it is. Hopefully in the future iTunes will have an option to set to store and organize different media types in different locations. Considering we are moving to bigger file sizes with HD video, and smaller HDD sizes with SSD, it's definitely something they need to think about. Perhaps this elusive large iTunes redesign purportedly coming later this year will allow such behavior.