iTunes Reorganization: The Ultimate in Procrastination
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Loading ...What follows is the God’s-honest truth regarding my current iTunes data. Like that old ad campaign when iPods first came out, it says a lot about someone about what’s on it; unfortunately, as you’ll see, my music library is WAAAY too big for my 20G iPod. Here’s the damage:
| Genre | Time | Size in GB |
|---|---|---|
| Rock/Pop/Metal | 5d 9h 1m | 7.65 |
| World (Arabic, Peruvian, etc) | 14h 25m | .864 |
| Jazz | 1d 21h 6m | 2.60 |
| Soundtracks | 14h 05m | .974 |
| 70’s (don’t laugh–at least it’s separate from the rest!) | 8h 9m | .45 |
| Spoken (Books, etc) | 1d 13h 8m | .654** |
| Techno/Rave | 12h 54m | .785 |
| Latin | 1d 19m | 1.48 |
| Ambient (sounds of nature, etc.) | 8h 55m | .552 |
| Classical | 19d 17h 53m | 27.98 |
| TOTALS | 32d 21h 42m | 45.47 |
(**Data is consistent given books would have a much better compression and hence smaller files for the same time duration)
So there you have it: if I click “Library” and just press “Play,” as of the date of this writing, it would be until May 5th before my library finished!! There’s about a 2G discrepancy with the total from what’s listed, and that’s exactly those orphaned/perhaps repeated files that I’m trying to fix. In case you were wondering, I have 3 160G drives connected to my G5 (2 internal, 1 external) so space isn’t the issue. However, this is getting WAY too big to manage. iTunes organizing everything for me is great, but it’s an all-or-nothing problem. Either I keep everything in one folder (which I don’t–those things which are long backed-up already are in a separate folder outside my home directory) or I have to manually manage names/etc outside of iTunes. I would like something more “smart,” allowing me to place files where I want them yet be able to manage them easily from iTunes, both in a playlist way and also have at least an indirect way of accessing the filesystem (disk) from within iTunes so I can manage filenames/locations and have iTunes update intelligently rather than it go, “Duh…Where did the file go, duh….” like it does now.
So there’s a good news and bad news situation I now face: the good news is finally finished acquiring the “Great Pianists of the 20th Century” series–all 200 CDs. (we won’t discuss exactly how…*drums fingertips together in evil fashion*) The bad news is, well, with 17G of files (not my decision to encode in 320bit MP3!) and many files which need massive ID tag editing, what’s the best way to go about it so that I 1) have access to these files from iTunes (and therefore my iPod), 2) don’t overwhelm my home folder, 3) don’t intermix these files (which already are backed up to DVD-R) with my other music, and so on. Don’t worry, it’s nothing I’m going to solve tonight or this week, even.
I’m not learning much endocrine physiology or neoplastic cellular signaling (for pathology) dealing with these things, but I am who I am, and this is quintessentially me.
Computing/IT, Music | enrico | 
April 2, 2006 4:57 pm
By raul, April 2, 2006 @ 9:17 pm
dammit, I swear there was an “iphoto buddy” type programs for itunes, but much searching reveals none.
Unfortunately, until I run across it again, if it exists, I can’t think of a good solution. If you have mulitple drives, though, a big home folder shouldn’t slow you down too much methinks