Where do you keep your iTunes library?

W

wayland1985

macrumors 6502a
Just out of curiosity, who keeps their iTunes library on their computer??

My entire library is kept on my external HD, and I stream it to my computer over my Airport Extreme base station. I have a 180gb internal HD in my MBP, and a 30GB song database.... I feel like it's a big chunk of my storage, and since I'm a frequent track-skipper... I think it's less wear-and-tear on my internal HD...

But the lag of the external HD has me re-thinking what I'm up to...

So where's your music library???
 
I used to have my library on an external before I got my laptop and never had much of a lagging issue even with movies, and I have a fairly large library. Now it is on the internal, and the movies are on an external. It was just too impractical, because I like to play my music through my computer wherever I go.
 
I have about 35 gigs of music and I keep it all internal. It is just easier since I use my macbook out of the house a lot. My movie collection is mostly on external though.
 
wayland1985 said:
Just out of curiosity, who keeps their iTunes library on their computer??

My entire library is kept on my external HD, and I stream it to my computer over my Airport Extreme base station. I have a 180gb internal HD in my MBP, and a 30GB song database.... I feel like it's a big chunk of my storage, and since I'm a frequent track-skipper... I think it's less wear-and-tear on my internal HD...

But the lag of the external HD has me re-thinking what I'm up to...

So where's your music library???
Click to expand...

I do what you do, but since I switched to a Seagate, the lag is not so bad.

Curious what you do to backup yours. I have a thread about backing up under this setup, and I don't have a good answer.
 
I keep my whole iTunes in my internal 750GB.

My music is about 13GB.

I have copies of my iTunes on 2 DVDs, an external hard drive, a NAS drive, and my Time Machine.

As well as on my other computer :D
 
On my Macbook, I've installed a 500GB drive so I keep my library on it internally. I used to keep all my music on an external, but I like being able to sit on the porch, on my coach, lunch break, school and be able to mess with my library, store and playlists. Of course, I back it all up to an external manually, and also backup using Time Machine. With 150GB of music, I can't affords to lose my stuff.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/530.17)

Drobo over FW 800.
 
Internal but on separate machines - one has classical, one has operas, one has everything else. It works OK for me. I load different iPods up from those machines.

The "everything else" library is on my main machine, currently a blackjack. It collects my podcast subscriptions and audiobook purchases as well.

I keep a fairly small selection from that machine on my MBA, which I use every day too. Usually what's on the MBA is stuff I recently bought, and a few playlists of favorites from different genres.

Movies and TV shows I just store on external drives, and when I want to reload one of my iPods I just fish out what I want and load it on the machine I'm going to load the pod from.

So really most of the TV / movies don't even have a library associated with them. Project for a rainy day I guess, now that iTunes supports alternate libraries with the option-open command.
 
I was all on my iMac's 640 GB. I'm under 100 GB free on that, so I'm going to relocate TV Shows to a 500 GB MyBook external.
 
160 GB of music on my Macbooks 500 GB hard drive, and manual backups to an external. I lost more than 100 GB of music once. Not happening again.
 
on separate drive, separate folders

I have a 1TB drive just for media inside my Mac Pro (since it holds 4 drives).
iTunes Music in one folder 130GB and iTunes Media (for TV shows and Movies) in a separate folder 287GB. In the iTunes Music folder there is an alias to the iTunes Media folder so that iTunes can find the movies correctly.

I found that having separate folders for the Music & Media helps make backups easier to separate smaller drives. Sure would be great if iTunes preferences allowed you to set a location for these different media types, such as a folder for Music, Movies, Podcasts, TV shows.

Also, iTunes should have a Vault style backup system like Aperture. Right now I have 3 scheduled backups, one for Music, one for Media and another for the Library which is stored in the User>Home>Music folder.
 
On my MacBook's internal drive, and in a SuperDuper backup on an external drive. Once I replace the desktop that acts as a Linux file server with one that supports more drives, I'll keep a copy there as well.
 
On a concatenated 1.25TB volume on a G4 in my server closet (pantry). It's being backed up via Time Machine across the network to a 2TB striped volume on another G4 in the same closet.

I then connect to the library and the back up drive across the network from yet another G4 and a Mini hooked up to my TV in the living room.

This way, I end up with one iTunes library and one Time Machine volume across my entire network.
 
I came up with an interesting solution when my internal drive filled up. I got a 320gb external drive for graduation, and I created two library files. I backed up all my music and movies on the external drive, around 20gb, then I made another library on the internal drive to keep the music I listen to about 90% of the time. I don' always keep my MBP hooked up to the external drive, so I will still have my favorite music whenever I'm on the laptop.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Back
Top