PowerTunes to the Rescue!

As I said in the first entry to this blog, I sometimes find iTunes so simple, it's hard to use.

It's particularly difficult if I want (as I do) to manipulate multiple music libraries whose number of tracks (each, not collectively) can be in the four and five digits.

The totality of what I'm contending with takes up 184.62 gigabytes on an external hard drive. It comes in seven separate folders, the largest of which is 88.8 GB. Basically, each folder (along with its vast subfolder hierarchy) is a separate music library.

No problem, right?

I know what you're thinking. I could just drag each of the seven folder hierarchies in turn to the iTunes icon in the dock. Or to the iTunes window itself. Or I could use any of the other common ways to add a bunch of tracks to my one central music library.

If I did that, though, I'd wind up with jazz from one library, a classical-folk potpourri from another, and rock-blues-pop from yet another, all in the same mega-library — perhaps 50,000 tracks worth, if duplicates are included. Sometimes I don't want that many tracks (or genres) in one library: it's too hard to find what I want to listen to. But, then again, sometimes I want one single vast library with everything in it.


What's the answer? If you use a Mac as I do, the answer just might be PowerTunes from Fat Cat Software.

PowerTunes (PT for short) lets you easily maintain multiple music libraries. If you're starting completely from scratch with iTunes, you can fire up PT and tell it you want to create a new music library. PT interacts with iTunes to arrange it all seamlessly. (Of course, you then have the problem of how to populate your new, originally empty music library, perhaps through iTunes Store purchases.)

If you're not starting from a completely blank iTunes slate, you can fire up PT and it will import the information iTunes is already keeping track of for your current music library.

Thirdly, if you already have more than one current library, you can point PT at each of the libraries in turn. It will switch between them all by telling iTunes to quit (if it's open) and then relaunch with a different library in mind.

Those options are enough if I want to have several separate libraries, but I want to do more than that. I want to have the separate libraries for occasions when they are useful. But I also want, on occasion, to have everything in one big library, no matter how hard it may be to navigate. For that, there is ...


PowerTunes' Merge Capability

You are going to want to have multiple libraries, if you have PT. Only one of them can be active at a time, though. That can sometimes get in your way ... unless you take advantage of PT's merge capability. Merging two or more libraries in PT creates an entirely new library containing all the tracks belonging to each of the merged input libraries, minus those that PT filters out as being duplicates.

(Duplicate filtering is, of course, optional, but it's one of PT's features that I relish. As I said, I have libraries that overlap bigtime. Without duplicate filtering, merging multiple libraries could create a monstrosity. But I'm getting ahead of myself; duplicate filtering is a topic for a completely different entry to this blog, "Duplicate Handling in iTunes.")

Getting back to the merge capability itself: When you merge libraries in PT, you can, if you like, tell PT to copy all the original music files into a brand new music folder of your choosing, after which iTunes will manage these files in the customary way (provided the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" iTunes preference is enabled for that library). Once you do the merge, you will then have two copies of each music file.

I am here referring to "music files," be it noted, yet when I do I also mean to include the various other kinds of media files that iTunes uses, such as Movies and TV Shows and Podcasts. They're all part of the "big iTunes picture," as I think of it. However, it's easier just to talk about "music files" rather than the somewhat abstruse "media files" or the wordy "music files plus video files plus podcasts, etc."

PT's ability to copy "music files" (et cetera) when doing a merge is something I like, but in certain situations you might want to disable PT's copying of merged music files. PT readily lets you do that, too, resulting in a merged music library full of "referenced" rather than "managed" tracks.

In my case, I have so many tracks that I prefer to have the tracks in the original input libraries that I am going to be merging be referenced, not managed. It is the output of the merge that I want to be managed by iTunes. This way of doing things means that I wind up with two, not three, copies of each music file.

This distinction between "managed" and "referenced" iTunes libraries is awfully abstract, I realize. However, it's something that you are going to have to grasp, if you want to be an expert PowerTunes user. I discuss it more thoroughly in "Managed" vs. "Referenced' iTunes Libraries.

Inputting referenced, not managed, libraries to PT's merge capability means that when, in PT, I create the iTunes libraries that will eventually become the input libraries to the merge, I need to disable iTunes' "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" preference.

I could do that manually in iTunes, with a promise to myself to turn the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" preference setting back on when I am done. But PT offers a simpler way. When creating each individual input library in PT, I can drag the Finder icon of the folder(s) containing all the input music files onto the PT window's entry for the library, while I am holding down the Command key as I drag.

The result is that PT temporarily suspends the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" iTunes preference setting while the files contained in the folder and its subfolders are being added to the library. Neat.

If, by the way, you typically have "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" disabled and want it temporarily enabled during an add-to-library operation in PT, you can just Option-drag the folder instead. The files in the folder and its subfolders will be copied into the iTunes Music folder associated with the library you are adding them to.


Oh, and PT maintains a separate set of iTunes preferences for each library that it knows about, so you can institute different default behaviors for each library. Each music library that PT uses has, quite naturally, its own central iTunes Library file to act as its coordinating database. This file is, in turn, associated with a unique com.apple.iTunes.plist file that resides in the same folder alongside it (along with an iTunes Music folder and several other special-purpose files). The .plist file contains the preference settings associated with this particular iTunes Library file.

By default, the enclosing master folder is named simply iTunes, though you can have PT rename it as something more meaningful if you wish. On a Mac, its customary full pathname is: ~/Music/iTunes, where the first "~" character, a tilde, represents the specific Mac OS X user's home folder. Hence, ~/Music/iTunes.iTunes Library is typically the fully qualified name of the iTunes Library database file.

You can learn more about the usual names of the various iTunes library files in the Apple support document "What are the iTunes library files?" Again, PT lets you change these files' names at will.

PT is, as you can see, a richly capable tool for managing multiple iTunes music libraries on a Mac. Highly recommended!

About This Blog

This "iTunes Notes" blog is about using iTunes.

iTunes is a lot harder to use than you might think, mainly because it's so "simple." The problem with things designed to be simple to use is that they actually hide a huge amount of complexity. I find that my iTunes use sometimes runs into problems because of all the hidden complexity.

For one thing, my brain is not as capacious as it used to be, so I'm apt to make stupid mistakes, such as losing track of the iTunes Preferences settings I want to use and either changing them inappropriately or failing to change them back when I need to.

(In iTunes Preferences: Advanced, the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" options make a big difference in how iTunes handles new items that you add to your library. The latter option determines whether adding new items causes copies of those items to be placed within the iTunes Music folder hierarchy as "managed" files, or whether the original files are left in place as merely "referenced" files. If the former option is checked, then the files that iTunes uses, whether "managed" or "referenced," are subject to being modified in various ways that help iTunes keep track of them for you. If you have a very large iTunes library — and I do — you may have media files strewn over multiple hard drives and accordingly may need to disable the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" option. If that is the case, there still may be times when you want to "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" anyway, necessitating re-enabling that option temporarily. Once you are finished doing whatever it is that you intend to do with that option enabled, you must remember to put it back in its customarily disabled state. I typically forget to do that.)

There are also things that iTunes supposedly can do well but actually does rather poorly, such as helping you manage and eliminate duplicate tracks.

Then there are the many things iTunes does quite well ... so many of them, I'm always forgetting how best to take advantage of them.


For those and other reasons, I find I'm continually needing to "look under the hood" of iTunes to accomplish tasks that most people never run into.

For instance, I have two Apple TVs that I use with iTunes, and I find that using an Apple TV can cause (usually minor) problems that might never crop up otherwise. For some reason, just to take one example, Apple TV seems to balk at discovering some of the album artwork that nonetheless seems to be present in iTunes' database.

Again, at this point I am just trying to give you an example of why we sometimes need to look under the hood. One possible solution to the problem I just mentioned, or so I believed, was to make sure that all my MP3 files contain the latest version of the ID3 tags that hold crucial information such as the name of the track, the name of the album, etc. — (sometimes, but not always) including the album art (if any) associated with the track.

If you select an MP3 track in your Music Library in iTunes and do a Command-I to bring up its Information panel, then click on Summary, you can check which ID3 Tag version the track uses. If it's anything lower than v2.4, it isn't the latest.

I have oodles of tracks that use v2.3, and some use the even older v2.2. Some of the tracks whose album art doesn't show up on Apple TV had ID3 tags older than v2.4, so I decided to update the tags. By selecting those particular tracks in iTunes and using Ctrl-Click to pop up a contextual menu, I was able to choose Convert ID3 Tags ... from that menu and then update the selected tracks to v2.4. That worked pretty well, with the result that album art that Apple TV formerly couldn't find suddenly began to appear on Apple TV.


So then I figured it would be a good idea to make sure that all my MP3 tracks use ID3 v2.4 tags.

Big mistake.

For reasons I don't fully understand, a huge number of tracks that had earlier ID3 versions, when converted by iTunes to v2.4, stopped showing their album art entirely, even in iTunes!

In trying to recover from that fiasco, I learned an awful lot of things that I never really wanted to know about iTunes album art. Much of it is useful information, at least in certain situations. Some of it can actually make your life easier, once you learn to take it account.

I'll be discussing more about album art and a host of other fairly advanced iTunes topics in this blog.

When I say "advanced," I actually mean that this is stuff about iTunes that I personally find challenging, whereas you might find the same stuff elementary.


On the other hand, I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining what I take to be the basics of iTunes.

Unfortunately, iTunes is so richly complex that even its basics fill every one of the several iTunes/iPod/iPhone reference books that your local or online bookstore can sell you. I have thumbed through several of these, and although they all have a lot of strong points, none of them say much of anything about the "under the hood" details of how iTunes handles album art.

For instance, I found little if any mention of the differences between how current versions of iTunes (iTunes 7 and later) handle album art and how older versions did.

Older versions, as a default, stored all album art in ID3 tags in individual MP3 files. Each file of a multi-file album contained a separate copy of the album art.

Starting with version 7 of iTunes, the default behavior changed. Instead of putting the album art in each individual file, iTunes 7 (and later versions) store a single copy of it in a separate Album Artwork folder.

If you import MP3 music that violates iTunes' current assumptions about where and how album art is stored — maybe it was created under an earlier iTunes version, or by software other than iTunes — it's all supposed to work.

But I found that that doesn't always happen.

Thus the need to look "under the hood" sometimes.

More about that in subsequent posts to this blog!