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gulmatan · Mar 29, 2009, 12:41 AM

Hi there,

Long story but let me Inigo Montoya sum up:

My backup of my Music folder is on another drive of another name.

I've taken this drive with me on the road and added music, made playlists, downloaded podcasts onto this drive.

When i get home, I duplicate the Music folder onto my MASTER drive at home. This is the drive and drive name I want to keep using for both my "on the road" and Home Master drive. So, I go through a rename of drives. When I'm on the road, I give the portable the same name as my Master drive. Thus, when I get home, I go through duplicating the portable onto the home drive and a name swap so that the Home drive goes back to its original name and the portable gets an arbitrary name.

Lomg story short, now iTunes thinks my music is on both drives (i.e. songs' file location says that a song is either on my master or my portable drive). You get the idea.

So, is there a way to rewrite the Location field for each song so that the field gets the MASTER drive's location?

mduell · Mar 29, 2009, 12:08 PM

Close iTunes, delete your iTunes music folder from your master, and copy over the music folder from your external.

gulmatan · Mar 29, 2009, 08:44 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Close iTunes, delete your iTunes music folder from your master, and copy over the music folder from your external.

How is this A--more advantageous than

1--Going into Preferences/Advanced/Music Library Location (or however Apple names it)
2--Click "Change" and direct it to my External
3--Select "Consolidate Library" from the File menu

and B--If I want to keep a backup of my Master library, why would I, as you suggest,

Originally Posted by mduell

Close iTunes, delete your iTunes music folder from your master,

mduell · Mar 29, 2009, 09:42 PM

I thought you wanted iTunes to be playing the content from your internal drive, not your master.

By copying, you have a backup.

gulmatan · Mar 29, 2009, 09:55 PM

Maybe I should clarify.

When I'm on the road, I want to work on, add, make playlists, update podcasts, etc. from this portable. Come home; duplicate this entire set and its modifications onto my master and, since I'm home, work with iTunes from my Master drive. Then, when I'm on the road, replicate the MASTER onto the portable. Thus, you see the cycle. But the kicker is that I want to have the Master drive's name on my portable when I'm on the road.

mduell · Mar 30, 2009, 12:20 AM

Why not just copy the iTunes library back and forth whenever you're switching "modes"?

Since you're not asking for merging (changes on the master and portable) it's pretty trivial.

What's this about drive names?

gulmatan · 02:41 AM

Originally Posted by mduell

Why not just copy the iTunes library back and forth whenever you're switching "modes"?

Since you're not asking for merging (changes on the master and portable) it's pretty trivial.

What's this about drive names?

I thought Apple, Mac and OS/X was all about letting the user tell the computer how to work. I didn't think Apple was about the Gates/WinTel way in you having to learn how to do things the computer's way.

All I'm trying to do is have the SAME name for my portable and desktop drives, clone them and depending if I'm on the road or home, iTunes sees the identically named drive whether I'm home or on the road. When I'm on the road, the portable has the MASTER drive's name. When I'm home, the portable's contents get transfused over and the portable gets a different name so iTunes only sees one name but it's actually using two drives, the portable on the road and the MASTER when I'm home. Why is this so hard to understand? So what if iTunes gets the headache and confused. I thought a Mac was all about letting the USER tell the computer what to do.

Chuckit · Mar 30, 2009, 03:25 AM

Why can't you just leave your portable disk with the same name as your master disk all the time? It sounds like it's renaming the drive at home that's the problem. Eliminate that and everything else should be able to fall into place. Or have I misunderstood?

mduell · Mar 30, 2009, 05:40 PM

Originally Posted by gulmatan

I thought Apple, Mac and OS/X was all about letting the user tell the computer how to work.

Not at all; it isn't designed to meet every user's stupid (that's not directed at you in particular, but at the population in general) whim. For the things it has been designed to do, it's said to do them in a reasonable/user friendly way. What you're asking for is not something OS X/iTunes was designed for.

Originally Posted by gulmatan

All I'm trying to do is have the SAME name for my portable and desktop drives, clone them and depending if I'm on the road or home, iTunes sees the identically named drive whether I'm home or on the road. When I'm on the road, the portable has the MASTER drive's name. When I'm home, the portable's contents get transfused over and the portable gets a different name so iTunes only sees one name but it's actually using two drives, the portable on the road and the MASTER when I'm home. Why is this so hard to understand? So what if iTunes gets the headache and confused. I thought a Mac was all about letting the USER tell the computer what to do.

That wasn't what I got from your earlier explanations. It sounds like you're trying to work around the shortcomings of iTunes by naming the volumes the same thing, but then you run into other headaches (like you can't have two volumes with the same name)?
Are both disks that contain your iTunes library external drives and you just take one on the road?
How about always using the drive you take with you on the road, and then make a regular backup (Time Machine or otherwise) to the disk that stays at home?

King Bob On The Cob · Mar 30, 2009, 07:23 PM

So, it sounds like you want to have an identical library on your home computer and on the go. iTunes is not designed to do this unfortunately, as it was written to be stupidly easy to use, and options such as these would just confuse "Grandma".

The best and I suppose "most correct" route would be to keep an additional external hard drive that contains your iTunes Library and point both computers to that drive and just swap the drive between computers when you want to use it.

There's a number of shareware products out there that will synchronize an iTunes library though if this is your only option. Try Google.