Use Ethernet Drive to store music files?

Can I set up an external ethernet disk and dedicate it to storing music... then store all my music on it rather than my hard drive and still access that music through my (wireless) network to play music on my stereo through airport express...
17" Powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Where does the computer come into your desired setup? If you connect the computer to the ethernet disk by an ethernet cable either directly or cabled through a router, switch, etc and then send the music to the Airport Express from the Mac via Airport that should work no problem.
But, more likely, if you were planning to pull the music from the Ethernet disk wirelessly over Airport as well, it may work intermittently (some skips in the music) because that is a huge amount of data going in two directions at the same time (the music data would be travelling from the Ethernet disk through the Airport Express to your computer and then going from your computer back to the Airport Express again). But it MIGHT work satisfactorily. I have iTunes Sharing turned on amongst 4 computers (3 Mac and 1 PC) and I can generally share in two directions at the same time. (But if I try to share more that two ways at once it gets dicey. I tried once with each of the 4 computers simultaneously playing music that was physically located on a different computer (4 separate simultaneous data streams) and that was hilariously unlistenable.) If you keep the data transfer low by playing only MP3 or AAC and not AIFF or other large file formats you will be more likely to be successful. (I think I may have had some AIFFs in the mix that caused stalling when I did that 4-way test).

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I would like to use GarageBand to remaster downloaded music files that are in iTunes. Poorly mastered files keep clipping and damaging my speakers. When I try to use an iTunes file as a new project, it greys out the iTunes songs so I can't select them.

I would like to use GarageBand to remaster downloaded music files that are in iTunes. Poorly mastered files keep clipping and damaging my speakers. When I try to use an iTunes file as a new project, it greys out the iTunes songs so I can't select them. Any ideas?

As I said - look whether your original file is damaged or not. If not, I wouldn't change it and find out what in your system makes it sound like it's clipping.
Good sound file, with volume maxed out. No need to change anything.
The same song clipped - no chance to repair.

Using an external hard drive to store music

Hey, i am using an iMac G5 and just installed leopard. i also bought an external hard drive so i can use time machine. I also hoped to put my music files on my external HD so it would take up less HD space on the iMac. My question is, is it possible to have the files solely on the external HD and still be able to keep them in my itunes library and play/manage the files from itunes? Thanks for the help

Follow the instructions in this article.
(25492)

Frustrated with iTunes Store music file quality.

Dear Apple iTunes Store supervisors,
Ive decided I will no longer buy music from itunes until you start to release music in a better quality, uncompressed, lossless-format and higher bitrate and sample depth. The list of albums i want to buy grows, and itunes store is not making my money because it fails to provide what this consumer, and many others wants. I know you can do better, so im holding out for it.
Please bring us uncompressed DVD quality (or better) sound files. Atleast an ALAC 24bit 48khz download option. We are paying you for the music.
Our computers support it. iTunes supports it. The outputs on our computers support up to 24/96000! Apple TV supports 48khz! Everything does (except some dated items like airport express)! So If almost all the hardware can do it, why cant we use the capabilities of our apple equipment with apple provided content? Give us 24bit/48khz or better files to buy!
Many agree. itunes store AAC's sound compromised compared to the music ive bought from B&W Society of Sound or HD tracks.
These distributors offer a qualty product and why shouldnt you too?? No professional would be satisfyed with the current download quality you sell. No discriminating consumer either. We're an educated country with standards and we have a larger market place than ever before. I know im not alone here... The public has clamoured for better sound quality for decades. But why does this always get compromised? Why sell unsatisfying music files that arent even to the standards of CD quality?
If readers want a demonstration of how sample rate effects sound, Play some music in iTunes, listen through the best system or headphones you have and go into your "Audio Midi Setup." Switch the output format to 8000hz .. notice how terrible the compressed sound is? Now, step by step increase the format to 16000, 32000, and up... you'll notice a point where the sound stops getting better to the ears. Thats where the limitations of either the file, or the hardware, or hearing are... but not the limitations of the hardware or its original recording! To fully display the depth and richness of the music, we need a file format that just exceeds our hearing like 24bit/48khz because anything less is HEARD as less.
Once we can identify that compressed absense of quality and have experienced what is possible, then why should we be satisfied with less?
Apple. Please improve the file quality availability by aquiring and providing higher quality music from your partnered record lables. Because we know they are recorded and mastered at MUCH higher quality, and when we buy the music thats what we want. That quality. You are capable of better, so please stop letting excuses get in the way. Make it happen. Market it as "Better than CD quality Download" and your sales will improve, wont they!
There's value to offering the option of a better file! Hard drives are affordable. Apple computers offer us tonnes of space.
I dont care if a cd is half a Gig, or a gig of data if it means Im getting the recording in its fullest quality.
Make it happen for us!! Its 2013.

I also wish iTunes would offer higher quality. However, I think the reason they don't is due to mobile devices and iCloud. In their attempt to give the majority average consumer the best user experience, they strip back features the minority prosumers would want. They developed a file type that sounds acceptable to most to maximize battery life, minimize hard drive space, and increase transfer speed on mobile devices. Apples goal is to give you portable music, and that is just what it is... Portable.
That said, I also do not buy from the iTunes Store either. As a music creator and DJ, I also buy higher quality files from other sources.

Want to store music files on a removable storage device..can this be done?

Hello! I am not a very technical person so please bear with me! My computer is a work issued computer so I cannot store personal files on it including music files. I have an external storage device that can hold all my music, but I don't know how to set it up to where iTunes links these files to the music in my library. I know how to import a folder/files into the iTunes library and I have done this many times, but when I close out of iTunes and then open it back up, it does not recognize/link any of files - and yes, I do have the external storage device hooked up! Can this be done? And if so, can someone please tell me how to do so?
Many, many thanks!!
Attessa

Remove the USB drive. Delete all the entries currently in the library.
Look in Preferences and make sure the music library is pointing to your *work computer hard drive.*
Make sure the preferences for "Keep..." and "Copy..." are both not checked.
Insert the USB drive. Add all the songs to your library. They should play.
Remove the drive. After a while reconnect it. Do they play OK now?

Hard drive failed - have music files but not library.itl file

So here's the situation. The hard drive on my husband's laptop recently failed. It is now fixed, but his data is lost. Luckily, we had moved his music files to an external drive. It appears that we only moved the music files and not the library.itl file. We have a backup from November of the library.itl file.
1. His ipod is fine. He wants to be able to pull the playlist info from his ipod to restore the info on the library.itl file. Is that possible?
2. If that is not possible, what are the ramifications of restoring the library.itl file from November? Will he "lose" the music that was added since then?

1. Not with itunes, sadly. It will try to wipe the ipod since it is a 'new 'library.
2. Yes, he'll lose everything added since November.

Using Hard Drive to save music

Ive copied all my music to hard drive on X drive. I have entered the location in the advanced setting but it does not work. Is there a simple way of making ITunes look at the hard drive for my music? (ive tried following some of the other suggestions but not got far)

If you make sure your external drive is always connected to your computer and recognized by Windows before you start iTunes, the exclamation marks should not be a problem.

Should I use an external hard drive to store the files while editing and how should I do this?

Getting used to FCPX and want help learning how to store my Canon D60 Video files on either my internal Mac book pro or on an external hard drive while editing projects?   Do the files need to be transcoded on the computer drive or can that happen on an external HD?
Thanks,
Greg

Well, in my opinion, it all comes down to speed. There are a lot of editors that swear that working with footage on your system drive will do all sorts of horrible things, cause crashes, etc. Really its a bunch a malarkey. The most it will do is slow you down when your system needs access to the drive. Bandwidth is bandwidth is bandwidth - its all the same. If working with video on your system drive caused crashes, so would doing thousands of other things and we would all have dumped apple long ago for Microsoft or linux.
Here's what I tend to get for sustained read speed on various drives (ie reading a few large files like video files):
USB 2.0: 25 - 30 MB/sec. Drive RPM doesn't matter much since USB is limiting factor, unless you're running a system.
Firewire 400: 28 - 34 MB/sec. Drive RPM doesn't matter much since FW is limiting factor
Firewire 800: 55 - 60 MB/sec. Drive RPM doesn't matter much since FW is limiting factor
internal drive on SATA II or III connection, or USB 3.0 external drive:
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    5400 RPM (most laptop drives): probably ~70-80 MB/sec
SSD: 250-500 MB/sec if installed internally or over USB 3. USB 2 or firewire connection for an SSD is a waste of SSD speed *except* that they have fantasticly fast random access for reading many small files, so I got a really fast launching system in an experiment installing a system on an SSD and connecting it via FW 800 - but that's not relevant here
so - to make a short story long - do whatever works for you. avoid using USB 2.0 or firewire 400 drives if you're editing HD - you can't play transcoded ProRes 1080p footage from them reliably. And once you have more than one clip overlapping, like at cross dissolves, you're sunk. You're internal drive is likely much faster, even with the overhead of the system using it too.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the app store is a good HD speed tester. Ignore all the video specific stuff at the bottom - its mostly for uncompressed video, which I doubt you're working with.
Since i have a recent macbook pro (late 2011) and my edits are usually not more dense than 3 layers of video at a time (mostly concert video rather than narrative film), I actually almost never transcode, or even render - and this is for 1080p HD video - because FCP X is so good at playing the imported original h.264 files. I store my media I'm working with on my internal laptop drive (which i upgraded to a 7200 RPM) or a FW 800 7200 RPM external drive.
h.264 files from the camera are much smaller than transcoded ProRes files, so they will play back from USB 2 or firewire 400 drives, but I would only do it in a pinch.
enjoy your editing.

How do I get iTunes on a new computer to recognize and use my files on the local drive? My music files on iCloud have been recognized.

My old computer failed. All files, including iTunes were backed up on a separate drive. All files have been loaded on the new computer. iTunes was reloaded, and recognizes all files on iCloud, but does not link to the files on the computer. How can I re-establish that linkage?

Hello jzinser,
I am not sure on how you reset up your iTunes library on your new computer. If you copied the music by dragging on top of iTunes, then the media would have been put into the proper location. If you have the media copied to your computer and have not established in iTunes where it sits, then you will need to do that within the preferences in iTunes. Take a look at the articles below for more information to help sort this out.
iTunes for Windows: Moving your iTunes Media folder
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201543
Locate and organize your iTunes files
http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht1391
Regards,
-Norm G.

Can I use Time Capsule as an external drive to store iTunes files, photos and to back-up my MacBook Air?

I need an external drive to back-up my MacBook Air. In addition, my iTunes library of music, TV shows & movies is pretty enormous and I'd like to move it from my MacBook to an external drive to free up space on the laptop.
I will need to access my iTunes library from my Apple TV and the MacBook. I also have an iPad which will need to sync with the external drive.
I would prefer the external drive to be wireless as I am very rarely docked when at home.
Is the Time Capsule the right piece of kit for the job?
Thanks.

Is the Time Capsule the right piece of kit for the job?
Not really, no.
TC is a dumb as board hard disk in an airport extreme router. It has no media servers.. no backup.. it is slow and designed for TM target for laptops. The major one here is lack of backup. Any files you put on the TC can and will be lost at some point.. and to backup you need to have a computer connected to it with an external hard disk.. and a 3rd party backup because TM is too dumb to back up network drives.
TC is designed to spin up slow and spin down quickly at the end of backup. You will have issues when you stream media from it.
ATV needs to connect to itunes server.. not the library. You will still need a computer running. Same for lots of things.. since apple designed their system to be dependent on itunes.
The best idea is a media computer.. a mac mini is ideal. Don't need the latest greatest.. but an actual mac running itunes. Unfortunately it doesn't have large internal drives.. so it is still a bit kludgy in needing a fast external drive.. but at least you have automatic backups.

How to temporarily store music files outside iTunes ?

I have been searching and toying but don't seem to find "the" solution.
my 40 Gb iTunes library resides on an external drive which is running out of space and would like to keep it that size as it is the size of my iPod.
How can I remove say the whole several Gb "Classical Music" content of iTunes and store it to a different location but keep it with its structure in order to be able to re-incorporate it into iTunes later on.
My question I guess would boil down to "how to remove chunks of iTunes" in their format to rotate those chunks back and forth always keeping iTunes max load to the size of the iPod ?
many thanks for reading me and happy new year to you all
jacques

Many thanks dwb and Matt
I wanted to avoid just that.
I have been experimenting several ways to remove (mouse draging) the files to other location (like the hard drive of my eMac which has spare room) and re-inserting those files back into iTunes either via Finder, via Import function of iTunes, via drop onto the iTunes Library ..etc.. no luck to have the the structure kept and iTunes able to "see" again those files,
hence my post here
I was hoping there was a way-
However thank you for pointing to the "Playlists" which I have never needed. I am taking with great interest your advice to get familiar with their use.
So from what you are saying you can turn "on" and "off" blocs of your library that way and only feed to hungry iPod what you need.
cool
incidentally I don't know why my count of posts has dropped to 1 when I have been around here for years.
Many thanks again
cheers
jacques

Using external drive with store

Hi,
I have run out of room on my computer for my itunes library, so I am now storing it on an external hard drive. The problem is, now that I am trying to order tv shows from the store, it seems to be taking A LOT longer (estimated download time = 9 hours!!!) Is there anyway to keep most of my files on the external hard drive, but when downloading, download first to my laptop, then transfer to external drive later.
Also, unrelated, when I sync my ipod in this situation, will it know to look to the external hard drive's information?
Thank you.

All my songs, movies, music videos and TV shows are stored on an external hard drive. And my Mac mini and MBP are accessing these contents.
The external hardrive is hooked up to my Mac mini. My MBP is accessing the external hard drive wirelessly. If I download from iTunes on my MBP, it goes straight to the external hard drive wirelessly.
I only have an iPod shuffle. If I wanna sync it with any of the two Macs I have, it will pull the files from the external hard drive. Of course, it will be so much slower doing with the MBP.
Anyhow, the trick is to set the iTunes Music folder location at Preferences... > Advanced > General tab
If you forget to mount your external hard drive when you launch iTunes, iTunes will set the iTunes Music folder location to default which is in your Home > Music folder. All you have to do is to reselect the iTunes Music folder location to your external hard drive.
If you have not done it before, you could get iTunes to copy all your stuff to the desired location on your external hard drive.
Hope this helps.

Hard Drive Crash--Restoring music files from External Hard Drive

My hard disk crashed, but I think (at least I hope) that I'm backed up. I had copied all of my Itunes music onto an external hard disk before the crash, although I'm not sure I copied everything that you are supposed for a full backup (i.e. all files in the Itunes folder). I'm uncertain as to the process to get everything restored.
Right now, Itunes is not installed on the new hard disk. Obviously I need to download and reinstall Itunes, which I'll do. But from here I'm confused, and I haven't seen a straightforward explanation of the next steps. Is it then as easy as copying all the old music from the external hard drive into the new Itunes music folder once Itunes is reinstalled, then synching? Or, do install itunes, then reopen it while the external hard drive is attached, and "consolidate" the old library into the new? Or do I first have to plug in the Ipod, authorize the new drive, and move the purchased music from the Ipod to the new drive through the manually managing music process that I've read about? Is there a relatively straightforward "step by step" process someone can point me at?
I'd appreciate any guidance anyone can provide, or any directions to some materials that I can read. Thanks very much.

If you copied the entire iTunes folder to the external, then all you have to do is install iTunes like normal, then start up with these instructions and point it to your backup on the external...
How to open an alternate iTunes Library file or create a new one
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304447
Assuming that works, you can either leave everything as is and continue to use it directly off the external. Or close iTunes, then again copy the entire iTunes folder back to your internal drive, then reopen iTunes with those instructions again and re-point it back to your internal drive's copy.
Patrick

Use Ethernet Drive to store music files?

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