Storing music on an external hard drive.
Posted by: SAT on 02 February 2012
Have read many threads recommending a NAS. I use PM thru a HiFace into my nDac and am very pleased with it; PM recommend moving the iTunes library to an external drive which can then be accessed from the MacBook. This would be very useful as my 250gb drive is almost full. Have any of you done this? What drives would you recommend for quietness and quality? Thanks in anticipation.
Use a drive that supports FireWire. I have Seagate, WD and Iomega drives and they are all quiet and haven't let me down so far. I use the Iomega for music with the other two for backup. I use a Mac Mini rather than MacBook, but the principle is the same.
It doesn't make any difference to the sound quality.
May I Ask what 'PM' stands for?
Migrating iTunes libraries is extensively described and documented on the iLounge webpage. Stongly advize to red the step by step guides posted there
May I Ask what 'PM' stands for?
I guess it's PureMusic ?
Still doen't ring a bell ...
I use a Seagate 2TB HD. I only use I-Tunes for my I-Pod and Zeppelin. But a word of warning. I transferred my I-Tunes library over to the HD in order to release space on my MacBook Pros' HD. I bought a 2nd Seagate to use as a back up. As I was setting up to back up HD1 to HD2 my grandson came bounding over the sofa and knocked HD1 of the shelf. It only landed on his back and I thought no harm done. But no, the drive wouldn't work properly. My photo library was the most important of the files on there. It would only work intermittently and I was able to retrieve the photo files I didn't have backed up elsewhere. Then I could retrieve nothing. I took it to a computer specialist but they couldn't do anything and my I-Tunes library was lost. About 300 ripped CD albums.
Lesson: always have at least 2 backups of anything that is valuable to you. I have decided to keep the old I-Pod as is and buy a new I-Pod for any new music I want to rip. I couldn't stand the thought of re-ripping 300 CDs in order to use what space was left on the old I-Pod.
God knows how I would have felt if I only used streaming as my only musical source and had lost the whole library.
Still doen't ring a bell ...
Pure Music is a piece of third party software that complements iTunes on a Mac. It can also operate in its own right. I tried it and didn't notice any improvement, but some folk like it. The way I tried it the bitstream from the Mac was identical (perfect) with and without active. However, I didn't spend a long time with it.
My recommendation is to use Bit Perfect for less than £5. It simply does a few things automatically that iTunes should do, but doesn't without changing the config or running some Applescripts.
I'm currently using a Mac Mini with the OS/iTunes/BP on SSD so it is silent. The music is on Iomega which is out of harms way, but very quiet, as it is fanless (as in it has no spinning cooling-fans, not as in nobody likes it).
Thank you for enlightening me on PureMusic. I'm not at all into MACs, except for my iPod/Pad, so I didn't have a clue ...
Yes, you're right it's Pure Music and switches from 16/44.1 to other formats up to 192/24. My Mac is one of the few made in 2008 that don't have Firewire but I believe there are many HDs that run with USB.
Thanks, Steve for the advice about double backup, a bitter experience eh? At the mo I've got the ripped cds in the loft and the HiRes on USB sticks as well as in the Mac. I use iTunes to rip and store cds losslessly as I've found that even their better downloads sound poor thru my system yet sound fine thru my daughters Zeppelin, window open wider, I guess.
Thanks also to Iver for the tip about ilounge, have bookmarked it.
Thanks again to Steve and Guido for the drive recommendations.