[Housteau]

Is there a good iTunes tutorial online that explains more than just the basic useage, such as the questions I have below?  I would love to have a good resource to go to on my own without needing to create a post for every question that comes up.

Anyway, this forum is the best resource that I know of right now.  Currently I am ripping my music to AIFF to the default location on my internal HD.  I have a good bit of space, but eventually I want to add an external firewire HD.  When I do that will I just need to change where the files are ripped to under the Preferences option?  When files are now being ripped to the external HD will all of the files located in both places, internal and external, be seen together when viewing the iTunes art for music selection?

I guess what I am asking is that doing this, is it different than creating a new Library?  And if I had created a new Library, not that I fully understand how, is that when the files actually would become separate from each other and not be viewed together?

With an external HD connected by firewire will it be continuously active as a spinning drive, or just when selected to play music?

[skunark]

When I do that will I just need to change where the files are ripped to under the Preferences option?  When files are now being ripped to the external HD will all of the files located in both places, internal and external, be seen together when viewing the iTunes art for music selection?

All you need to do is pick the new location and iTunes will use the new drive for new media you rip and use the old location for old media on the internel drive.   There is an option to consolidate the library to the current "new" location.  Sadly this doesn't move but copy the files and you will have to goback and carefully delete the now dupilcate files.

I guess what I am asking is that doing this, is it different than creating a new Library?  And if I had created a new Library, not that I fully understand how, is that when the files actually would become separate from each other and not be viewed together?

There is a way to open/create a new library when you open iTunes but this is not needed unless you are sharing the external drive with another computer.

With an external HD connected by firewire will it be continuously active as a spinning drive, or just when selected to play music?

Internal/external drives won't spin unless they are being used. You might not even notice unless the drive has an activity light.  I would argue FireWire is overkill so don't pay more for it.   I would also recommend a mobile hdd that is bus powered, this will avoid power warts and noisy fans.  Also do make sure you use timemachine or some offsite backup service like back blaze if you have a large collection. 

[Crimson]

iTunes will see both locations when adding a second (and subsequent) storage location, and will not treat them as separate libraries. For reasons of portability and future library migration, I'd recommend consolidating your library to the external drive (change your default iTunes library location to the external and then consolidate).

BTW, deleting the original files on your internal drive is quite simple after consolidating them to an external: simply go to your internal's iTunes folder in Finder and delete all the music files. After consolidation, iTunes does not look at the original files that were copied to the new location.

You're always welcome to post any questions here as it helps the group as a whole. Also, Apple's iTunes support page is a good resource for all things iTunes.

[Housteau]

Thank you.  Those were very quick responses and right on target.  I am used to PCs and I don't know my way around a Mac yet to even do many simple things.

The reason I was considering Firewire is that my DAC is USB and I understood it best to separate the external HD from also sharing the USB if possible.

Could you explain to me a little about Timemachine and how I should use it to my advantage?  I assume this does auto back-ups?  Where would these files get stored, on a second external HD?  If so and if I use Firewire, can one drive be connected in series to another?

[K Shep]

I will share my setup - Mac Mini AIFF content; stored on an iOmega Minimax 1TB external hard drive (Firewire).  I have a second iOmega with all of the files backed up, sitting dormant.

[jtwrace]

I will share my setup - Mac Mini AIFF content; stored on an iOmega Minimax 1TB external hard drive (Firewire).  I have a second iOmega with all of the files backed up, sitting dormant.

I have the same but my second minimax is partioned so I can backup the OS and music files.  I use SuperDuper! for backup which is GREAT.

[Housteau]

I will share my setup - Mac Mini AIFF content; stored on an iOmega Minimax 1TB external hard drive (Firewire).  I have a second iOmega with all of the files backed up, sitting dormant.

I have read that this HD can be noisy.  Can you hear it? 

[jtwrace]

I have read that this HD can be noisy.  Can you hear it?

Not noisy at all IMO.

[skunark]

The reason I was considering Firewire is that my DAC is USB and I understood it best to separate the external HD from also sharing the USB if possible.

As long as you don't use the USB ports on your keyboard or monitor, it should be fine, I haven't experienced any issues.  Unfortunately a lot of these tips refer to the less expensive PC hardware which multiple ports might be shared in the same way you can plug the mouse into the usb port on the keyboard.  Those devices use an inexpensive USB hubs which shares the bandwidth between the downstream devices.   There's a lot of different possibilities on how the USB ports are provided on a computer, but it doesn't hurt to try it before you rule it out.   I think all FW HDD sold today have USB ports and on a mac you can experiment with that and iTunes won't know if you were using the USB or FW port on the drive. (just don't use both at the same time)

Your mac has an optical out via the headphone jack which potentially would be the better connection to the DAC if you have hi-rez music.

Could you explain to me a little about Timemachine and how I should use it to my advantage?  I assume this does auto back-ups?  Where would these files get stored, on a second external HD?  If so and if I use Firewire, can one drive be connected in series to another?

Time Machine is an automated backup that requires either external USB/FW drive, Airport Extreme + USB drive or the Time Capsule w/internal drive.  Time Machine will do an initial backup of your internal and external drives which could take several hours, once that is completed it will backup modified and new files on a set interval when your computer is on.  Apple's description of Time Machine: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/time-machine.html

The Airport Extreme/Time Capsule would require a network connection to the computer and might be initially slow.  I wouldn't recommend the Airport Extreme/Time Capsule to back up large video files but should be fine for audio files.    Keep in mind that your backup drive needs to be larger than the data that you want to back up.  For example if your iTunes drive is 1TB then I would probably get a 2TB drive for Time Machine.  But keep in mind that if you only have 1TB of data to back up you can get two 2TB drives and be fine.

A disadvantage of Time Machine (and all backup solutions) is that it doesn't handle moving large amount of data very well, and essentially the data will get backed up twice.    I use iTunes on a laptop and from time to time I will rip a CD on the internal drive and just consolidate the files later to the external drive before I allow Time Machine to do it's magic.  But...Apple added a new feature recently that does a slight change on how it organizes music, video, podcast, etc and I clicked it without thought.   The result was all of my music files were moved to a sub-directory and both Time Machine and back blaze started to backup these files again.   Time Machine actually aborted because it ran out of diskspace, so maybe if you have 1TB of storage, you might want 2.5TB for the backup drive...  I ended up wiping the backup drive and just restarted Time Machine but I lost any file history associated to the backups. 
 
The advantage of FW over USB is that you can daisy chain the HDD which would ease cable congestion on the back of the computer.   When you start to daisy chain the HDD, you will need use self powered drives.

[Housteau]

Would it be best to just manage the back-ups manually then?  Would that be easy enough to do?

[skunark]

I've learned that I'm pretty forgetful (or just lazy when) i manually do backups in the past.  Time Machine works really well, with anything there's always little gotcha's which I was just letting you know my experiences and I wasn't trying to scare you away from doing backups.     I also wanted an offsite backup of my music and found back blaze easier than Time Machine since I have a reasonable broadband connection and it's only $5/month for unlimited storage and free to recover if you download the files.  If you do want backups and concerned about the cost then I would consider something like back blaze over Time Machine.   With any offsite backups though, you need to be concern about security and probably should use an encrypted image or a usb thumb drive for that data. 

[skunark]

If I was in your shoes today this is what I would probably do, for a music library smaller than
<=1TB: Mobile USB hard drive, as they are silent and powered over usb port  cons: costlier than desktop
    for example: http://westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=722
    w/Time Machine:  select the 500GB for the library and 1TB for the backup
<=4TB: Desktop USB or FW800 hdd    cons: power wart, fans (example is fanless)
    for example: http://westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=621
    w/Time Machine:  select the 2TB for the library and 4TB for the backup
 <=7TB:  Raid5 Desktop USB/FW800 hard drive   pro: can handle single hdd failure when you use 2 or more drives cons: price, power wart, fans, size, requires 2 drives for fault-tolerant.
    for example: http://drobo.com/products/drobo-s.php
    w/Time Machine: I would probably recommend offsite backups over Time Machine at this time
would start to question how usable iTunes, or other music players, actually are...
<=12TB: Raid5 Desktop USB/FW800 hd drive, pro: can handle single hdd failure when you use 2 or more drives cons: price, power wart, fans, size, requires 2 drives for fault-tolerant.
    for example: http://drobo.com/products/drobopro/index.php
>=12TB: If you actually have this amount of music today I would probably just wait it out a year for HDDs capacities to double again otherwise it is rather expensive to set up and maintain.
 
These are just examples, I don't want to promote one brand over another especially since there are only a handful hdd makers and hundreds of ODMs rebranding them.   Drobo is interesting as you can purchase 2 HDD to start with and expand as you need.  Since Drobo is fault-tolerant (raid5 like), you will have to subtract storage required for the fault-tolerant data.    i.e. four 2TB drives would be about 6 TB of data storage, and with eight 2TB it would be about 12TB of storage.

[Housteau]

I have been looking at Back Blaze.  That looks like a nice solution and eliminates the need for another onsite large HD for backups.

The Firewire 1TB Iomega Minimax for $117 also looks good to me.  My concern was for noise, but from what I have read here and elsewhere that doesn't seem to be an issue.  I put one on order to try it out.  With these two solutions I think I am good to go, until next time of course.

I do have a portable WD 500G USB drive that I have been doing manual backups with.  I am careful to protect material that once lost is lost for good.  I generally keep multiple copies of music I consider very hard if not impossible to replace.  Some are my own recordings in different resolutions.   

[jtwrace]

I"ll say it again for backups:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

[skunark]

I"ll say it again for backups:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

SuperDuper appears to be a GUI/Scheduler for rsync or at least has the same functionality.  It's an interesting solution and much nicer than using the command line, but I couldn't find any documentation or user guides on how you would restore the files though. 

Solutions like Time Machine and Back Blaze adds one more level of backup protection by creating snapshots at set intervals and will allow you to restore files from any or all of those set intervals.  Normally these snapshots are created every thirty minutes for one day, with nightly snapshot for a week and weekly snapshots for the last 4 weeks for back blaze and Time Machine will keep snapshots until your drive fills up and then will periodicly remove the oldest snapshots. 

It's up to the user on which solution they prefer and they all have their pros and cons, but the downfall with all of these backups is that they also duplicate any file corruption, but Time Machine and Back Blaze offers a window to recover them that SuperDuper would not.  One would have to use raid5 (or products like drobo) to guard against file corruption on the drive.

An audio dealer pointed this out to me a few weeks back and I felt that this article was on to something when ripping CDs.  I'm still debating if it's overkill...(hrm maybe a topic for the hi-rez circle)
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Computer-Audiophile-CD-Ripping-Strategy-and-Methodology

What I find most interesting in the article is how they recommend to rip, archive the rip and use a secondary copy for playback of the audio files.  I would probably argue that a raid5 solution would allow you to combine the archival and playback to a single location assuming your media player didn't modify the files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_(computer_storage)

 

[Housteau]

I finally made it back home and my new iOmega Minimax was here waiting for me.  I had it installed in a snap and it is now the new destination for iTunes music.  I find it runs quiet just as everyone here has told me it would.  My next step is to Consolidate the music in the old location to the new, but I am having trouble finding that option.  Exactly where is it and is is called Consolidate, or something else?

[Housteau]

Ok.  I found it .

[skunark]

Cool.