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I have a rather enormous Music collection. The music itself is approaching the 1TB mark. I am storing that on an external drive already. My iTunes library files are in their default location (/Users/me/Music/iTunes). My iTunes media folder is on an external drive /Volumes/iTunes/iTunes Music

This has been working as expected.

Now I would like to store just the contents of the Movies folder in the iTunes media folder on a separate drive. Apparently, iTunes doesn't like aliases or symlinks.

I saw somewhere that one could mount a volume in a different directory than the default /Volumes. I would like to permanently mount my new Movies volume in the directory /Volumes/iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies. I know there is a command to do this, but how does one configure Mac OS 10.6.4 to always automatically mount that volume in this directory?

I hope someone can enlighten me... If I find a solution, I can finally import all my movies into iTunes and be able to search them and stuff - it would be a dream.

Thanks,

M

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3 Answers 3

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For everyone's reference:

I ended up settling on a 3 TB RAID because Mac OS X doesn't like any other solution. When using the above procedure and mounting the drive in a non default location, any item I would try to play (I was dealing with movies) would immediately disappear from iTunes. Poof! Gone. The item would still exist on the drive, just gone from the iTunes library.

So I thought - that sucks and went with a RAID.

I think Apple is going to have to deal with this at some point because it is rather impractical that one can't store their Music, Movies, TV Shows - anything that resides in a separate folder in iTunes on its own volume. My iTunes library is approaching 2TB at the moment and the only reason it hasn't passed the 3TB mark yet is because the realization that I will need an even bigger RAID (hateful!) to handle all of my content halted my quest to finally import and organize my 500+ DVD collection.

Oh, well... I guess I will continue to painfully browse the huge DVD storage folders where you can't search and even keeping things in alphabetical order is a chore. I had wanted to import all the movies and then properly tag them so I could search based on the score composer, director, actor etc. That would be sweet.

Anyway - just wanted to make sure anyone arriving at this page knows the solutions described are of no use in this particular case. Must be something about the way the iTunes database engine handles links. Apparently it is unable to follow them...

M

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This is possible with an automount share from a server. It should also be possible in the terminal with the diskutil. You will need to determine what your actual device identifier for the Movie drive is first. You can show all of this information by entering

diskutil list

in the terminal. You will see information like this:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            249.7 GB   disk0s2

The Disk Identifier for my Macintosh HD, for example, is disk0s2. You would use that information to mount the device in the place you want it.

diskutil mount -mountPoint /Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/Movies disk2s2

If something goes haywire, you might have to unmount the disk with:

diskutil unmount disk2s2

I haven't actually tried this, but it's probably close. If it works, you might have to use a login hook script to make it mount every time you log in.

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  • Thanks for the suggestion. Problem: the bsd names for the devices may change depending on the order in which the drives register with the system. So I would have to find out what the bsd name for the volume is each time before I custom mount it. Is there no way to do this by UUID instead? Nov 3, 2010 at 1:28
  • Yes, the UUID should work as well. You can find it with the command diskutil info /Volumes/EsternalDriveName
    – Theo Belk
    Nov 4, 2010 at 0:31
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iTunes used to follow symlinks inside its media folder fine, but recent versions (10.4 upwards, iI think) seem to have lost that ability (I had my Movies on an external drive symlinked into the folder and never experienced any trouble; with the 10.4 update, I noticed iTunes could still see the files, but would ignore the link for organizational purposes, i.e. newly added media files would not be filed into “Movies”). However, there is another, slightly less convenient way to achieve what you want:

iTunes will happily manage files stored anywhere there by just storing the path to them in its library. That is exactly what it does when you uncheck the “Copy media into the iTunes folder” option in settings. If you would like iTunes to manage all your library but your movies, TuneSpan (freeware) will leverage this ability to just link a subset of your files stored somewhere else into the library.

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