All I wanted to do was change the mount point that my music was exported on. A simple change from one path to another on my NFS server. What I’ve ended up with is a total train-wreck — my library is in a shambles.
I’m sure that in the past when I’ve relocated the library all I needed to do was select the new location in iTunes Preferences. iTunes would recognise all the music in the new location and update the library. This time, however, nothing I did would tell iTunes to look in the new location! If I made the old location unavailable, it complained that all the music files were not locatable. If the old location was present, iTunes just didn’t bother making any change to the index. At one stage I told it to “Consolidate Library…”, one of the many recommendations I found on the Innerweb for handling iTunes Library moves, and it started copying duplicates of all my music files into the NFS share.
The worst part came when I told iTunes that it could manage my music library. The Web and iTunes Help told me that with this option enabled, iTunes would keep my library organised according to artist and album detail. Since my library was already quite structured I thought there would be little for it to do. Unfortunately, iTunes didn’t think that my library was quite structured enough. It started unwinding things like the “Compilations” directory — a directory it had created itself — into strict directories for the artists on a compilation. I don’t have many compilation albums, but it was making an an absolute mess of a couple of albums that have songs by different artists.
So why was this a problem? The problem happens because my library is shared between a number of applications — iTunes itself, ccxstream for sharing music to the XBMC-running XBoxes, and firefly (formerly mt-daapd) for streaming to DAAP-capable players (like Amarok and XBMC — I was looking at using DAAP as an alternative to running ccxstream).
So now I have a broken library. All because I wanted to change /data/music to /lvs/music. Why can’t iTunes manage that? Why is it that iTunes feels it has to dereference the link to the music location, and if it thinks nothing has changed, not update anything? As part of trying to get this working I had let iTunes move my library back off NFS to local disk, and I renamed the folder to try and hide it from iTunes as part of telling it that I had moved it. When I went into iTunes preferences, the library location showed the name that I had renamed the folder to!
iTunes is obviously smarter than I am. I should have not bothered trying to organise my storage the way I want to — once I let iTunes touch my network, I should have just let iTunes have its way. So recommend all the iTunes fan-kids who posted some of the recommendations I read.
I’m much less keen to throw down on an iPod touch now, or even the Apple TV I was talking Susan into. Maybe I’ll feel different after I’ve worked out how to put my library back together… or better still, worked out a way for me to manage music on my (and Susan’s) iPods without iTunes (my previous efforts there haven’t been successful).
Crossed Wires 