Huge music collection managment?

First of all, I am very new to Mac. I just got my Macbook Pro for my birthday two weeks ago. So far the transition has been great. I still have my self built pc for all my other needs. Heres my situation. I have an enormous music collection... around 200 gigs (college makes it easy to steal music off of other peoples computers). Anyways, I have all this music on a separate hard drive on my pc and it is also all backed up on my external hard drive. My music is not well organized and there are several duplicate files. My question is: is there a way to have all my music only on my external hard drive but still be able to play them on itunes without transfering them to my mb pro's hard drive?

 

iTunes Preferences - Advanced - *Uncheck* "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to the library"

This will allow you to play your files from wherever they are stored. You don't need to worry too much if the folders in which your music is organized *on your harddrive* are in a mess: As long as the tag information is correct, iTunes will group them fine. (In fact, how you happen to organize your music on your harddrive has nothing to do with how iTunes handles things; just make sure artist, album, etc. info. is correct.)

If you need to edit tag information, the info tab on iTunes will help you add/change information for single files or whole chunks.

There does exist software which scan your music files and try to determine the necessary information for them; iEatBrainz is one example.

 

to get itunes to help me edit tag info... do i need to sign up for an account? Do they charge me anything?

 

no and no

=]

 

Well, when you rip your own cds using iTunes, the program retrieves the information automatically. I don't think iTunes helps at all with already existing mp3s; you should either use programs like iEatBrainz (didn't work for me, but maybe you'll find it useful) or enter everything by hand. ----Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I just checked out a site for iEatBrainz... and its deprecated now... any other suggestions to help me organize my external hard drive?

 

A better way for managing your music would be to have iTunes use your External HD as its music library. You can easily do this by going to iTunes>Preferences>Advanced>General>Change, and then select the folder containing your music library.

If you have plenty of HD space and some time to spare, you can create a new empty folder, point iTunes to it, and then use the Import feature in iTunes (File>Import) to have iTunes automatically arrange your entire music library in a neat way.

After doing that, you can let iTunes automatically detect duplicate songs you might have, and delete them by going to View>Show Duplicates.

There is no reason to use other applications when you have a Mac native application that can already do all this for you.

 

heres the problem with my external hard drive: I reformated it a while back to NTFS so I could put movies on it. I know macs can only handle FAT32. If I reformat it back to FAT32, will I loose all my data? (this is very important... I can not loose this). Should I make a partition on this drive? It is 500 gigs so there is space and I have 192GB free.

 

transfer the music to the laptop, reformat the drive, transfer it back to the external.

if you just format it without doing this, bye bye 200GB. it would be somewhat deserved though, since most of it isnt yours

 

If you reformat your drive with PartitionMagic or something, you will not lose your data. If you use Disk Utility or Windows Explorer/Disk Management Tool, you will.