[dspinelli]

Great piece Kirk. I picked up a lot of good pointers with iTunes from that. I think Apple needs to better identify that iTunes is now becoming the standard for media management on the Mac. I don't have 13,000 files or 100 gigs of media data like some here have posted but I expect to finally soon load my 400+ CD collection.
I do have a back up issue that I am looking for advice on. I have read all the posts and my situation is not covered. I was excited to read in your article that iTunes has incremental back up, but I am now realizing that the back up is limited to removable media only.
I have recently purchased Time Capsule to back up my Macs. But my iTunes data (30GBs) in on an external drive and Time Machine will not perform incremental backups of the data because the drive is being shared via USB off the Time Capsule (go figure).
So right now I am waiting appx 6 hours for a manual copy of my iTunes data from the shared external HD to the Time Capsule's drive.
If Apple won't lift the limitation on iTunes back up going to devices other than (very limited) optical storage devices, then how can I easily perform incremental backups of my iTunes data (preferrably automatically and behind the scenes)?
Note I am a home user and do not want to go spending hundreds of dollars on 3rd party backup software after I just invested $600+ in Apple's Time Machine (OS upgrade) and a 1 terabyte Time Capsule.

[jrm42000]

I'm glad to see that there are other people wrestling with similar issues as I am. Hopefully Apple will take notice and make some necessary improvements to iTunes. I have read Kirk's article, related posts, as well as a number of other articles about what is the best way to manage multiple libraries in iTunes. Ideally, I would have a system set up such that my entire library was located on my external hard drive and then all of my 3-5 star songs automatically synced with the library on my MacBook Pro (I would like to do something similar with iPhoto). Currently, I have all my songs and photos on my laptop, but I am running out of space. I want to make sure that whatever system I implement will be easy to manage as I have heard from other users that seem to have complicated their lives by moving to a multiple library system. Any suggestions on how to actually accomplish this? Should I consolidate my whole library on my external hard drive and then delete the 1-2 star songs on my MPB? In theory it seems that this will still enable me to access those songs if I have my external HD connected, right?

Any help would be much appreciated!

[Nighthawkeye]

This may not be very high tech, but I have teens too and we just use one giant liabrary into which goes all songs bought by any family member, then copy the songs we individually want into each family member's individual folders and only scyn those folders to that member's iPod, nano, or iPhone. Simple, but effective.

[csleh]

Bastion, Thank You! I spent an hour following the article how-to, which did not work no matter what I tried. Started over with your very simple directions and it worked. Saved over 40gb from my hard drive. Hurray!

[Jolegs]

Okay, here is my problem. I bought a second external hard drive yesterday. I copied all of my music from my first HD and my laptop to the second HD. After that I consolidated my library making the second HD my main HD for my music. I also deleted the mp3 files that were in my laptop. The second HD crashed and lost my all of the files. Now, my question is: How do I go back to the first HD and still keeping ratings, play count etc? Hope someone can help me out. Thank you.

[nbishop65]

I have two users on my iMac - me and my girlfriend. We both use the same itunes libray on PC and now on the iMac I want both accounts to share the same library... how can we do this.