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 ...
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!
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