The Overlarge Music Collection

So my music collection has ballooned to about 140GB of tunes. I use high-quality encoding, so it’s not a gigantic collection, but there’s plenty to it.

But we’ve run into a snag.

You see, we use iTunes to manage our music. Christy has a Mac; I use Linux, another Mac, or a Windows PC (depending on what I’m doing). Up until the music collection got huge, we just kept the “master” copy on Christy’s Mac, and I’d use rsync to duplicate the library to other systems as needed. Simple, and it allowed us to sync tunes to an iPod which, if you use the Rendezvous stuff that iTunes wants you to, you can’t do from someone else’s shared library.

Now that our library is that big, I’m using an external hard drive, but it’s clunky, and due to filesystem restriction the Mac can’t write to it. It’s totally work-around-able, but irritating. And who wants to lug around a second hard drive when you want to listen to some tunes while typing away on your laptop?

So step forward. Here we have 120GB of tunes. We can’t just share it out over a network easily for iTunes to connect to, because the database format will vary between a PC and a Mac (the paths to files are totally different). I think I figured out how to make it work, but it’s a bit of a hack. Also, we like to take some music with us on trips, and how do you take just part of your collection, other than an iPod?

Some obvious solutions present themselves:

1. Upgrade the hard drives in our laptops and desktops. You can pick up a 250GB for about $200 in a laptop form factor, and for the desktops it’s substantially cheaper ($100 for 500 GB). This is the most expensive option, and not entirely satisfactory since one laptop belongs to my employer. Total cost is around $600, plus massive amounts of annoyance as I reinstall applications and operating systems.

2. Make a computer in my house into a Linux server. Heck, I have one available. Stick a single large hard drive into it, then mount the music collection over the network from clients. This is the cheapest option, at only $100 for the new large HDD, but the downside is that when we’re not at home, our iTunes collections — except on our iPods — are not available. This method also involves some strange hackery to make sure the iTunes databases for the PC and Mac are kept separate.

3. Use some other clever method suggested by you.

So how would you approach the “problem” of having a music library which is entirely too large to put on a notebook PC without a significant hard drive upgrade.