Recommended Addition to iTunes
This is a suggestion I submitted this evening as a feature enhancement to iTunes. Contact me if you agree or have a different idea on how to handle this.Over time I have amassed a rather healthy sized iTunes library. A great deal of my library is music. Even so, music takes up very little space compared to the other content which iTunes handles the organization of for me.
I could certainly go through the painful process of manually managing the locations for the different content types iTunes handles for me. However, it would take me a large amount of time to handle this unfortunately complex issue.
Instead, it would be nice if iTunes had the ability to designate different locations for different content types. While I might take this time to specify specific categories for myself, I imagine others may desire additional categories or different categories altogether. That being the case I think handling my request by providing 'smart organization' options in the iTunes preferences you open iTunes to much greater organizational customizability without necessarily making the interface much more complex for end users.
Using a similar interface as iTunes already does for smart-playlists to allow users to select either a pre-determined selection of content types or a dynamically generated list of content types would be perfect in this scenario. A user would simply choose to create a new content rule and specify their selected parameters for organization. Following those parameters iTunes would then provide an option for the user to have iTunes keep their library organized so that new matching content would be handled by the smart-organization rule.
Thus if I buy a new TV Show or TV Show episode via the iTunes Store it would download, and then iTunes would simply transfer the downloaded file to the rule's specified destination and iTunes would check if the destination was on a separate drive deleting the originally downloaded file if so needed (obviously not deleting the file if it has not been completely and successfully downloaded).
As my iTunes library grows in excess of 2TB (due to HD video podcasts, hoards of music, TONS of TV Shows and several movies all from the iTMS as well as compatible content from other sources) it seems that I either need to transfer my stash to a RAID based storage array (commonly too expensive for most people - myself included), setup a SAN based storage system (again too expensive - and often complicated for most users) or wait until drives exceeding 2TB in size are produced and sold at an affordable price.
Barring any of these things occurring soon... I feel it prudent for iTunes to outgrow it's single library location limitation and broaden its view to encompass multiple possible storage locations.
The solution I have described above is simple enough for basic users to control their storage locations easily, but powerful enough for seasoned and power users to setup very complex rules for organization. While my needs are to simply separate my content out to multiple drives (TV, Music, Podcasts, Music Videos, Movies, Audiobooks, PDF accompaniment files) I can imagine some of us would desire much more granular control. Enough to say I would like "all" "TV Shows" of the "Genre" "Drama" with original air dates between "10/01/2005" and "07/01/2008" to be placed in the following location "Drive-Name".
I thank you for being patient and reading through my suggestions for iTunes this round. I truly hope my suggestion is passed on as I feel it warrants merit (or I obviously wouldn't have suggested it).
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Tags: itunes library smart lists playlists smart organization organization lists itunes library organization submitted apple enhancement request addition improvement feature storage limited limitation
Tags: itunes library smart lists playlists smart organization organization lists itunes library organization submitted apple enhancement request addition improvement feature storage limited limitation
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