Half an idea (itunes)

Is there a good way to move a file, once added to your itunes library?

Because, if there is, then I can use my macbook, when it arrives, with my ipod, instead of using my desktop, which is windows, and causes me unhappiness. My idea, you see, is that, though I can't really afford to store all my media on my macbook, I can store it on my homebrew nas.

When I'm away from home, if itunes is anything like well behaved, it'll just note that the file isn't physically present on the computer's side, and patiently wait for it to show back up. New files I could add locally, and later relocate to the nas with the rest of the files. It's this last bit I'm not sure about. how painful is that to do?

 

Make itunes treat your ipod as a hard drive on your desktop. Move your music into your ipod like you would move stuff into a flash drive. Plug ipod into macbook. Open itunes on macbook. Import music one by one onto macbook.

Yeah it takes forever, but it works.

 

That's not what I meant. Is there a way, in itunes, to say "the physical location of this song has changed"?

 

What do you mean by "physical location"? I don't get it.

 

I think I get what you're saying...you mean that you want all the music files to be stored on your desktop computer, but you want your MacBook to be able to "enter" the other computer to play the music on the MacBook, right?

 

Set up Samba or some type of share on your desktop and your mac can access them over the network.

 

Here. I've got a NAS, in the form of a Linux box with SMB shares. All my music is on there. So, I can point itunes, running on the macbook, to that media. Everything syncs; good game.

When the Macbook is away from home, iTunes will say "I can't find the songs," but it'll see that they're still in the library, and so won't remove them from my iPod when I sync. Everything's good so far.

Now, here's the trick. When I'm away from home with my Macbook and iPod, and I want to download some podcasts, copy some songs, or rip a cd or something, I think I should be able to add it to iTunes locally on the Macbook, and then come home, move the files from the Macbook to the server, and then point iTunes to the new location of the files. How do I take a song in the iTunes library that I've moved to someplace new, and update the file location?