iPod How do I manage my music?

[Yr Blues]

I have half a terabyte of music on an external hard-drive that I want to link to iTunes. The last time I tried this I waited hours and it probably would have taken a day, so I aborted the process.

 

[PcBgone]

Go into your preferences in itunes, go to the advanced tab, uncheck copy files to itunes library.

Then go to file add to library, and select where your music is stored. It will then list the music in itunes, without copying to your hard drive and stream it from the external drive..

 

[Yr Blues]

I did that, but then it tries to copy the album art...and that's when it slows down to a grind.

 

[broncopde]

Do you want that external drive to be your iTunes library folder?

 

[Yr Blues]

Do you want that external drive to be your iTunes library folder?

Yes

 

[dmiller]

you can uncheck 'automatically download missing album artwork' under the store tab in preferences...then the process of adding artwork should not happen

 

[phairphan]

As someone with a similar setup and amount of music, I can tell you the setup process will unavoidably take a lot time. Even if you disable the album artwork download you'll be dealing with iTunes analyzing each track for gapless playback. You can stop the process manually, but each time you relaunch iTunes it will start reanalyzing. Unlike album artwork, there is no setting to disable this process.

The extreme slowdown you were seeing was iTunes trying to analyze gapless playback and process the artwork at the same time. I suggest starting this before you go to bed/work/school and hopefully it will be done when you wake/return. This is a one-time process, so you'll only need to do it once.

 

[Yr Blues]

As someone with a similar setup and amount of music, I can tell you the setup process will unavoidably take a lot time. Even if you disable the album artwork download you'll be dealing with iTunes analyzing each track for gapless playback. You can stop the process manually, but each time you relaunch iTunes it will start reanalyzing. Unlike album artwork, there is no setting to disable this process.

The extreme slowdown you were seeing was iTunes trying to analyze gapless playback and process the artwork at the same time. I suggest starting this before you go to bed/work/school and hopefully it will be done when you wake/return. This is a one-time process, so you'll only need to do it once.

That's what it was doing. I did uncheck artwork and it still try to do that, but I guess while it was doing another process at the same time. This sucks. The fear of a hard-drive constantly grinding away is that it'll put wear and tear on it. Oh well. Might as well bite the bullet and let it happen over night.