iTunes Managment

Here are a couple of very hard earned tips when managing large iTunes libraries:

• NEVER, EVER, Under any circumstances, start iTunes without the music library mounted. This can cause many hours of work to re-connect iTunes to the missing files.
  
  
• The only way to merge libraries is at the file system level, dragging whole libraries into iTunes causes more trouble than it's worth.
  
  
• External NAS-based iTunes servers suck. I have a 2TB ReadyNAS NV+ from NetGear and it's a piece of shit. Performance is poor, the UI sucks, and it takes 20 minutes to start-up.
  
  
• Anything over 25k songs really hurts iTunes performance.
  
  
• Lots of people talk about managing large libraries. Lots of people think that 10 Gigs is a large library. Things that work with 10 Gigs, struggle at 100 and fail at 250GB. Make sure you research any new technique.
  
  
• Over USB2, 250GB (50k+ files) take 6-8 hours to copy. Try not to do it twice.
  
  
• I could not have gotten everything under control without a number of scripts from Doug