How Do You Manage Your Music/TV Shows/Movie Collections?

[someone800]

I know a lot of people manage them through iTunes, but some of you who have 500 GB + collections, do you use an internal or external drive?

[baggss]

I use both internal & external. I have 5 internal drives, 4 of which are used exclusively for HB converted Video and 6 external drives (in an 8 bay USB-2 case) 4 of which are used for my music collection.

I use the internal drives for Videos they are SATA II drives are are significantly faster than USB 2 or Firewire 400. The external case will be replaced in the next few months by 2 4 bay external e-SATA cases with corresponding drives of at leas 500Gb each.

[someone800]

I use both internal & external. I have 5 internal drives, 4 of which are used exclusively for HB converted Video and 6 external drives (in an 8 bay USB-2 case) 4 of which are used for my music collection.

I use the internal drives for Videos they are SATA II drives are are significantly faster than USB 2 or Firewire 400. The external case will be replaced in the next few months by 2 4 bay external e-SATA cases with corresponding drives of at leas 500Gb each.

Nice. How do you manage those through iTunes though? Do you have separate libraries you load up when you want to sync with iPods or view through iTunes?

[baggss]

Nice. How do you manage those through iTunes though? Do you have separate libraries you load up when you want to sync with iPods or view through iTunes?

Nope.

Once you add the tracks to iTunes it keeps track of where they are all located on all of the drives. It's completely transparent unless I move something to a different drive. Then I have to delete it and re-add it (or fix the broken link). Since I am on a desktop machine, the externals are almost never disconnected when the machine is up and running. Everything is in one Library. I have about 95,000 Audio Tracks, about 650 Movies and about 2600 TV Show episodes all in my iTunes Library.

All 7 of my iPods ( I really only use 3 of them) are set to manually sync so that's not an issue.

[dynaflash]

Easy, in the advanced preferences under the general tab in iTunes, just uncheck "Copy Files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" . That way it will link to wherever you have your movie stored but not try to copy it to your libraries folder. So you can use it to organize however much you want. Just keep adding drives.

[someone800]

Nice. How do you manage those through iTunes though? Do you have separate libraries you load up when you want to sync with iPods or view through iTunes?

Nope.

Once you add the tracks to iTunes it keeps track of where they are all located on all of the drives. It's completely transparent unless I move something to a different drive. Then I have to delete it and re-add it (or fix the broken link). Since I am on a desktop machine, the externals are almost never disconnected when the machine is up and running. Everything is in one Library. I have about 95,000 Audio Tracks, about 650 Movies and about 2600 TV Show episodes all in my iTunes Library.

All 7 of my iPods ( I really only use 3 of them) are set to manually sync so that's not an issue.

That's one kind of a setup. I'm surprised iTunes can handle that though.

[baggss]

That's one kind of a setup. I'm surprised iTunes can handle that though.

Why are you surprised? iTunes is a pretty versatile application.

[someone800]

That's one kind of a setup. I'm surprised iTunes can handle that though.

Why are you surprised? iTunes is a pretty versatile application.

True. Maybe I am just remembering the early days of iTunes. I think I remember hearing people with large libraries over 100 GB then complaining of iTunes choppiness with handling the files.