Sync to Laptop - but music on an external HDD that mostly not attached

[rawdawg]

Hi,

Now I KNOW this must have come up before. I'm sorry to repost if so. I searched this forum and others along with just looking on google, but I got no real helpful info. My question is simple... it's got to be common.

I just bought my first laptop. Officially retiring my 1.25 Dual G4! In it is everything I have. I have about 130Gb of music. The past day I've been manually migrating everything over--what a hassle! I wanted to start from scratch and doing it manually made the most sense.

I want to keep my music on an external hard drive that will stay on my desk. But I know I will be syncing my iPhone quite a lot when not at my desk. I would be *nice* to have some music to manage on my MBP but since I have an iPhone I won't cry about it-- I do know I can have multiple iTunes libraries, maybe I'll look into that in the future but it sounds complicated right now for my main concern. --->

How do I tell iTunes to not worry about syncing the music portion of my media when that external HDD is not attached?


On an related note. My iPhone is only 8GB. A few months back I thought about creating a separate library of the music I mostly listen to and transcoding it to 128Kbps AAC (from the ~240VBR it mostly is). The resulting library should be small enough to manage on my MBP and I could sync my iPhone only with that. When I add music in the future I could do it to the main library and transcode into smaller files for the smaller library. I am concerned about how the playback quality would be affected, but when at home with my nicer stereo I would use the full quality music from my external HDD. Does this sound like a good idea?

 

[iPhoneKiller]

I recommend creating two iTUnes library's.

The music on your HD on the laptop can go to one of them and the External can go to the other.

Hold down shift and open iTunes, *Note iTunes must be closed

Once you have the new library, go to edit->preferences->advanced-> select an iTunes folder location

Choose your external HDD

Now you have them seperated, just when you want to switch back and forth between library's, just open iTunes while holding shift.

EDIT: In the info tab deselect automatic sync and enable 'manually manage music'

 

[shamanana]

This is an older thread, but the only one I could find that (kind of) touches the problem I have with iTunes libraries and iPhone.

The thing is I have a smaller Podcast only library on my PBG4 and a larger music library on my external HD. Not sure if it's important or not, but I created and manage both libraries with an app called Libra. Not sure why I never tried that option-shift or something while iTunes is starting. Not important.

The important part is that iPhone only allows connecting to my internal library, since I used that one when activating it. So, how do I get to sync it with my external one and get my music?!

Sure, I could always merge the two libraries but... I had a reason to split them in two in the first place...

If anyone has a good idea, please let me know.

I found this but it is kind of "scary"... not sure if it even works on iTunes 9

http://www.andrewgrant.org/2008/03/30/how-to-sync-an-iphone-with-two-or-more-computers.html