iTunes, Yahoo! Music Engine and the need for music library organization
So I’m quite a consumer of music. I wouldn’t have a blog that attempts to offer information about new music and my recent listening habits if I wasn’t one. But for now, I’m soliciting feedback from any readers to suggest new ways to efficiently manage my massive music inventory.
I use both iTunes and Yahoo! Music Engine. Part of this is out of necessity (I have a Mac at home and YME only works with Windows systems), but I actually like having the options. And I use last.fm’s Audioscrobbler plugin to capture my song-by-song listening habits across both systems so that it can analyze my tastes and recommend new music to me. You might notice the last.fm banner on the right of my blog, www.kidsallright.com. (For now, it isn’t very detailed because I created a new profile for "notrivers" to match my blogging handle…but I’m making sure to listen to a lot in order to fill it out. Go here for my detailed profile).
YME is great to have at work because it is a subscription service with a pretty good and up-to-date library so I can sample new music while working and decide if I want to buy it later. Case in point: The Rakes’ fantastic first album, Capture/Release, isn’t even out in the US yet (if you are looking for something of theirs to sample that is available domestically, try their great EP Retreat), yet I can get Capture/Release in a fully downloaded format via YME as part of my monthly subscription for free. Plus, I’m still a bit of a traditionalist in that if I like an album, I really prefer to own the CD so that I can geek out on the liner notes. So, generally I’ll sample new things in YME and then go buy it as a CD after a month if I like it enough, and then I’ll rip it onto my Mac at home, putting it on iTunes and my iPod. With Amoeba’s LA location so near my home, it’s still fun to take record shopping trips every so often.
So, at home I use iTunes on my Mac. And on my home collection, I’m up to
63.5 GB of music. (And I’ve still never even bothered to finish encoding all of my CDs…so someday I’m going to remember a lot of music that I have and haven’t listened to in a long time). I love having such a large library…but here’s where I have trouble with managing my collection:
The harddrive of my Powerbook is only 60GB. I keep all of my music on a 200 GB external harddrive by Seagate. The drive I have is fantastic; once a week it automatically backs up all of my data onto the drive. So what I’ve done is this: I have the music that I’m currently listening to actually on my powerbook. Right now, that amounts to probably around 10 GB or so. That music is of course automatically backed up onto my Seagate drive and kept alongside the other 50+ GB of music that I have. When I add a new song onto my harddrive, it gets backed up onto Seagate within a week.
I used to manage my music directly off my external drive when I had an older drive (it was a LaCie model, which I wasn’t too fond of…crapped out on me after about 15 months). But I like having music on my local machine so that I can move the laptop around the house and take it with me (it is a laptop after all)! Having it tethered to the external drive got to be a pain. So having the music I’m interested in today as my full iTunes Library and on my laptop is great…and I love the fact that my whole collection is still nicely organized on my external drive. Except…I’d like to be able to easily say, "I’m interested in Jazz today. Play a mix from all of my jazz recordings." But today, if jazz is not on my powerbook, I can’t do that. I have to go onto my external drive and manually pick out all of the jazz albums that I want to add to my local machine.
So what I’d like to do is have an easy way to toggle between the library that’s on my powerbook (today’s selections) and the full library that’s on my external drive. This proves difficult because iTunes doesn’t let you explicitly tell the program which library to use. You can point iTunes to different Music folders, but it automatically latches on to the local library folder. If I could simply create two different libraries and point it from one library to the other, I think it would work fine…but I can’t seem to get iTunes to work that way.
So, after this long post, I’m asking for feedback. Can anyone recommend a good way to manage a full library remotely but still have a small collection of locally-hosted tracks using iTunes? If so, please suggest in the comments area below.
Thanks!
