Hitting the big 3000 - in Itunes

[British]

I finally did it. I am at 3200 tracks in ITunes. Probably a lot are dead links, but it's safe to say I have hit the 3 grand mark.

And now I am downloading a bunch of trax at home that I downloaded from work, many are yousendit links.

Then there's the big addition from punkmodpop.fr. I listened to that today and realized there are some realy badly ripped tracks. One had various Windows XP bells heard, the other had someone screwing with the pitch control. I have since written down(emailed myself) which ones to remove them from circulation.

Has anyone ever been overwhelmed on mp3 consolidation? I make it a habit to do a "save link as" for artist - track on yousendit links, then fill in the id3v2 tags for future shoutcast broadcastin'.

THEN I stil have to do more vinyl rips. I'm going to run out of hard drive space soon.

It's maddening I tell you!

[siouxmoux]

3200 tracks as in purchase in Itunes?? I have not Itunes for awhile now, But It would be great if Apple finally got on the ball and start offering an larger variety of 80's reissued music on their itunes music store. This would make great opportunity to help support these great bands from the new wave era.

http://geeklinks.net/ttvm - Where Tech TV Lives On.

[Frau_Blucher]

[quote]Originally posted by British
[br]I finally did it. I am at 3200 tracks in ITunes. Probably a lot are dead links, but it's safe to say I have hit the 3 grand mark.
[/quote]
Sounds like you're organizing the files yourself rather than letting iTunes do it. It's a preference a lot of people have, especially if you want to keep genre or era segregation - I wish iTunes had that function (does it?!). But once your library starts getting really huge, you might consider its "Consolidate Library" function. You can pick a destination directory and have iTunes move every single song into their respective Artist/Album or Compilation/Album folders. As it goes through each song, it'll let you know which it can't find the source for and give you an opportunity to search and reconnect it.

I did this at about 10,000 songs to move the library to an external drive and it went without a hitch. Since then, it grew to 25,000 songs, but performance started getting pokey on my iMac after about 20,000. But it also made it easy to remove 10,000 songs worth of directories to a secondary folder for stuff I didn't feel compelled to always keep in iTunes. The 'select' library of 15,000 now hums pretty nicely, although faster computers shouldn't have a problem with bigger libraries.

Of course at these sizes, backup becomes essential. Everyone's backed up right?!!! [:0] At todays hard drive prices, no one shouldn't at least mirror their colleciton on another drive. I walked into CompUSA yesterday and 160gig external FW or USB2 drivers were on special for $79! I'm also anal and do a 2nd DVD backup by just sorting iTunes by date and dumping new additions to disc 4 gigs at a time.

But now the problem is video. Even under 1000 videos and only 40gigs, I can see the looming organizational issues. Anyone know of applications that handle video in the same way the audio apps do?

[coop41]

Blir, thank you so much for the info, I have one library with about 14,000 songs on it and it's well organized and then awhile back I got a 200 or 250 Gig hard drive and have put about 36,000 songs on from various sources and it has just sat there because they are a mess! When I find some time I am going to try this!! Who knows what is on there!
Thanks again![:D]

[1980-F]

Hey, Blir!

There's a program named Cellulo (for the Mac), which has a similar interface as iTunes for organizing videos. I haven't used it much, but you can make playlists and it seems to work with all formats quicktime understands (and maybe some more?)

Don't have a link, but should be easily found on www.versiontracker.com

[Otters Walk Among Us]

I have about 8000 tracks on itunes, a couple other folders full of songs, and a folder of aiff files from vinyl rips. All backed up, of course!

I'm glad I don't care about video.

[Unfragged]

What is the best back up method for music? Any suggestions would be appreciated..

[Frau_Blucher]

Excellent info 1980-F...thanks! Coop, whenever you do something wholesale like this, remember just to try it out on a smaller selection to confirm it's doing what you want it to do.

[amplifyyourheart]

I've hit 3078 in my iTunes...and my folder titled "Awesome 80s" (from which many tracks I post here reside) is at 1236 songs! My critera is that it's stuff from the 80s I remembered & loved...and any new (to me!) 80s tracks I've added.


amplifyyourheart

Never become what you used to mock.

[Frau_Blucher]

I forgot to mention another routine I do to keep up-to-date on my music backups. I use a file sync utility on my two music hard drives so that the library on one is always updated and mirrored in the second. On the Mac side, RsyncX is an extremely powerful scripting tool based on a public domain R-script engine. It can handle extremely complex network duties for multiple sources and destinations, but you can just use the simple GUI interface to do basic syncing of Source and Destination Volumes or Directories. It's nice that it can weed out Unmatched files so you're not constantly keeping outdated junk around either.

What would the Windows gurus suggest to use on the Windows side? I always hated the included Backup tool in Win2000. Has it gotten any better in XP? In particular, I want to run backups and keep all the files in native format rather than glommed into a compressed file.

[SwampThing]

There is a feature in iTunes called "Smart Playlists" that can slow it down considerably. I had about 20 of them active with my library of 25,000 songs and ran into performance problems. I scaled it down to 5 and it runs really smooth now.