Categories
Archive

Ask PowerPage: Archiving iTunes

 WIDTH=I have a confession to make: I am an MP3 junkie. I have managed to rip, download and swap over 30GB of MP3 files and my hard drive is almost full. My question is about archiving (not backing up) MP3s from iTunes. I have spent a lot of time creating playlists and my entire iTunes music folder is organized by artist courtesy of the “keep iTunes Music folder organized” preference.


 WIDTH=I have a confession to make: I am an MP3 junkie. I have managed to rip, download and swap over 30GB of MP3 files and my hard drive is almost full. My question is about archiving (not backing up) MP3s from iTunes. I have spent a lot of time creating playlists and my entire iTunes music folder is organized by artist courtesy of the “keep iTunes Music folder organized” preference.

I am moving all my data to a new PowerBook and I want to archive about 50 percent of my tunes to an external HDD but want to preserve the playlists that I have spent a lot of time creating. My experience has been that archiving iTunes is not easy. Is there a way to archive a subset of my iTunes music library and preserve playlists at the same time?

My goals are two: first to archive tunes that I don’t listen to (to free up drive space), and second to archive playlists and the songs that are in them. Examples: 1. Archive all songs that are not currently in a playlist (or everything older than six months), and 2. Archive selected playlists and their associated songs.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.