Part of iTunes on External Hard Drive?

Question

I have searched the discussion forums for an answer to my issue. I have an idea that may work for my issue, but want to ask before doing anything. I can only find one discussion that covers the nature of these questions and no clear answers were given. (That thread can be found here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1567293

Answer 1

Bippity, A couple different ways will work. You can split your music library between your iBook and ext HD. I think Cowboy is suggesting that if you do this, you should make a playlist containing all the songs that will go with you when you disconnect the hard drive. That way, you won't have to rummage for songs among the dozens that will have the little exclamation points next to them.
Yes, when you reconnect your ext HD, you'll want to remember to reset your iTunes Music folder location to it. It's not that big a deal. There's a lot of misunderstanding about this setting. The location setting only affects future actions, like adding new music to your library. It does not affect the location of or iTunes' ability to recognize the songs that already are in your library. I read the post about a guy's library getting all messed up, but you can be sure a lot more water went under the bridge than the person just disconnecting his HD and forgetting to reset the music folder location when he reconnected it.
There are a couple of not-too-old posts about splitting an iTunes library between two hard drives that have relevant instructions. The process takes some care, but it's doable.
Your idea to create a separate user account for the traveling music collection is fine. Just remember, it's a separate library from your regular account; you'll be maintaining two separate libraries. There really are no cross-over efficiencies, like automatically syncing playlists or new additions, available. You mentioned sharing, but sharing doesn't really come into it. Here's what I would do.
1. Open iTunes in your main account. Change the iTunes Music folder location to a folder on your ext HD. Make sure that Keep iTunes Music folder organized is ON. Now, do a Consolidate Library operation, and wait. This will copy all of your song files to the new ext HD location, keeping all playlists and all metadata intact. Your main account iTunes library no longer cares about the original song files on your iBook HD, and you can delete the original iTunes Music folder to open up disk space.
2. Create the new user account. Open iTunes. In Preferences:Advanced:General, turn "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding..." OFF. Use Add Library to add the entire music folder on your ext HD to the iTunes library. This just creates entries in your new library. No music files are being copied to your iBook from your ext HD yet.
3. Start removing songs that you don't want to take with you on the road from the library. You will only be removing entries from the library; this will not delete song files from your ext HD. When you are down to the collection that you want to take with you, you are ready to copy those song files from the ext HD to the iBook HD. (If this seems like somewhat inefficient copying from one computer to another and then back, it can't be helped. Each user account is its own destination.)
4. Check to see that the iTunes Music folder location is set to the default location in the new user account Music/iTunes folder. Then, run the Consolidate Library command. This will copy the traveling song files to your iBook in the new user account.
Note that the creating the new user account iTunes library this way does not carry any playlists or star ratings (or other special iTunes metadata) over from your original library. If this is a concern, let me know. There is another, more complicated path you can take to set up your new user account that will preserve that data.