OK, I've been trying to phrase this for a few minutes on twitter and have determined it's something that's short it's not something that can be expressed in 140 characters or less, so I decided to blog it. Recently as I've been working from cafes more and more, I've become frustrated with iTunes. As my laptop is my "daily driver" when is comes to my computing, and as the drive in my laptop is only 200GB I store the bulk of my media on an external USB drive which sits in my apartment.
To illustrate, I use Aperture as my photography workflow. Aperture has a feature that allows me to "relocate masters" to an external drive, which I use to move any images that I'm not using to an external drive. I have the ability to move photos back to the main laptop drive as I need.
This is exactly what I need in iTunes. The ability to move music (and video) on a file by file or playlist by playlist basis. For example I have a few hundred audio dramas in my collection (plays, books,etc). On the average day, I need at most one of them with me. But I'd like to switch them in and out on a regular basis.
Sean Reiser, 40, is a developer, technologist, and amateur photographer. Sean has spent the past 20 years as a programmer, system architect and development manager. He is a life long New York resident.
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I think the easiest way is just buy a bigger harddisk for your laptop...
That would seem to be the easiest on the surface, but it really isn't.
iTunes positions itself to be the catalog for all the Audio and Video media on your computer. If you were to download all the 121 episodes of Lost (including the upcoming final season) would consume 60GB on your disk (an average iTMS TV episode is 500GB). That one collection would be a tenth of the largest laptop harddrives.