Depending on your age, when you hear the word "alias," you either think of J.J. Abrams and Jennifer Garner, or you think of Hannibal Hayes and Kid Curry. Somewhere between those two, though, there came Apple's version of aliases, which weirdly became better known on PCs when Microsoft took the idea, and made "shortcuts" (so innovative!). Microsoft made the better, clearer name, but when they took the concept they didn't read to the end. OS X aliases do everything shortcuts do, and a significant amount more, to help you manage files on your Mac. It's a shame that more of us don't use them.
This week, the Pointers crew was asked about a particular problem, involving switching between two iTunes libraries. It's a bit of an unusual situation, but the answer to at least making it easier was to create an alias. See the way we did it in this particular situation, and you'll see how you can use aliases much more than you do now.
The following was tested on OS X El Capitan, but it's worked since some time back in the 17th century, when we were on OS X Zorro.
Defining the problem
This Pointers isn't about the wisdom or the necessity of having two iTunes libraries -- that's a conversation for another day. This week, we're solving, or at least addressing, one thing about it. If you have two libraries, and want to switch, then quit iTunes and reopen it while pressing the Option key. Instead of the usual iTunes app, you'll get a dialog box that explains that it needs a library, go give it one. If you choose Open Library, then iTunes will give you a regular Open dialog box for you to find this other collection of yours.
Only, it does this every time. That's every time you want to change: iTunes will always remember the last library you used until you choose to change again. Each time you do, though, this Open dialog box always pops up, and it always starts you off in your Music folder. Doubtlessly, if you have gone to the trouble of having two libraries, then you have a reason -- as well as a lot of audio files, and you're not keeping all that in the same place as your first library. So every time you want to switch, you're faced with schlepping through your whole Mac's folder structure to get to this other library.
That's the bit Pointers can fix. Do the following, and you still have to go through that Open Library dialog, but your second music library will be right there in front of you -- or so it will seem.
Do this, then that
Quit iTunes, forget iTunes. In the Finder, dig through your drives and folders until you reach the folder that contains your other music library. This is important: you want the folder that this library is in, don't drill down further to specific files like iTunes Library.itl. Get to the folder, and then make an alias of it by right clicking, choosing File/Make Alias, or pressing command-L.
OS X creates a new file with the same name, plus the suffix "alias." It also adds a little curved arrow to the icon, attempting to indicate that the real file is somewhere else, over there, over somewhere else. You can't get rid of the arrow, but you can rename the alias. So do. Rename that alias file or folder to something like Other iTunes Library Lives Here, and leave that window open.
Now open another Finder window, and drill down to the Music folder on your Mac. Drag the Other iTunes Library Lives Here alias into there, and you're done.
Worth the effort
Next time you want to change iTunes libraries, hold down Option as you open iTunes and when it asks you where this other library is, there it is. Right there in the Music library, you have a file or folder called Other iTunes Library Lives Here. Click on that, and you're right in to the folder with your second library. No hunting around your files and folders anymore, no messing.
Another fun alias trick with iTunes
Lurking inside your iTunes folder, is a folder called "Automatically Add to iTunes." Regardless of what you've set for iTunes preferences as far as copying files into the library folder itself, putting iTunes-compatible media in this folder, automatically take it out of this folder, and moves it to the appropriate location in the library folder. As a final effort, iTunes then adds it to the library.
Making an alias to this folder, rather than having it seven folders deep, makes adding things to iTunes easy. Think
what you can do with this, a home server, and shared folders!
Just scratching the surface
Some people use aliases for documents so that they can, for instance, save an invoice into a folder of invoices, but also seemingly have a copy in another folder dedicated to that client. We'd actually
look at tags for that, instead of creating aliases all over the place, but it's true that all you have to do is open either the Invoices or Client folder and know that you're seeing everything you need.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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