Is music management and merchandising a good major?

What is the best iTunes music management configuration for an external 3TB+ music library?

• I need to replace my external DROBO drive stack with a more manageable solution.  To be clear, this will hold my main music library-- no music will be stored on my computer.

• Answer:

  iTunes typically is bad at handling large libraries. Your iTunes library file will get very big and iTunes will slow down. My advice is do not share the drive over wifi. There are several ways to accomplish this. First, you can change the advanced settings in iTunes and point to the new location. A better idea would be to create a symbolic link of the new location to the local iTunes media folder. This way, if iTunes loads and the drive is not mounted, iTunes won't create a new directory in your computer. I would suggest going a step further and replacing the Dock or Desktop shortcut with a script that checks to see the drive is mounted, if not, mounts the drive and then launches iTunes. If it can't mount the drive, it won't launch iTunes and you won't get errors. This is pretty easy on the Mac wi AppleScript, and if you need help, I'll write you one. You should also make sure the external drive is set to mount when your computer starts up and defragment it regularly. To manage the files and tags, try out SongSeargent or beaTunes. Both do a great job of organizing the files. To add new stuff to iTunes, put them in the Automatically Add To iTunes folder in your iTunes library directory.