I have a 1st gen drobo running 4 (four) 1.5 tb wd caviar drives on a 3-4 yr old hp running vista. I have a large collection (over 100K tracks) of music mostly ripped in apple lossless.
itunes takes a great long time to launch when the drobo is connected, but not so much when it’s not. i have an airport express that drops for a second or two about every minute. i have spent hours on the phone with apple tech support, but they have no solution.
any ideas?
Your iTunes library lives on the drobo, right? At every start-up of iTunes, it checks the itunes.xml file for the proper connection to the library. the larger the library the longer this process takes. If the Drobo isn’t connected, you should get a message about the library cannot be found, please choose another.
What does the airport express talk to? Another Apple base station? have you tried manually setting the available channels for wireless? All Firmware is up to date on all the pieces, yes?
I have a Drobo v2 with 4x 2TB drives. It’s about 60% full. With the drive attached via FW800 on my i7 iMac, it takes 11 bounces of dashboard and iTunes to get everything loaded up. After that, it’s very snappy.
I really think you have two issues here…the size of your library and an intermittent network connectivity problem. I would fix the iTunes specific issue first and then start on your wireless.
in iTunes you can specify the itunes library (the xml files) to be stored locally (your computer) for faster access WHILE all your itunes media is located in a different folder (remotely: at the drobo connected to the airport).
If you need help I can show you how.
I bet this will increase the overall speed of itunes, since it will only need to access the drobo when you play a tune.
Yes, that makes sense about the library. I have the files on multiple drive letters on the drobo and the library file on the drobo as well. Loading itunes sometimes takes more than 20 minutes and I need to quadruple click on tracks to play.
What is the best way to get the library file to a local drive?
Thanks.
quit itunes.
Move the library folder anywhere in your local disk. Then open itunes with the control or alt key pushed (don’t remember which one in Windows), that will make iTunes prompt you for the location of the library. So next you browse to the local location of the fodler and there you go!
Thanks. I’ll give it a try. I think I saw an article that says to hit shift before opening to access the library function.
Should I copy instead of move to avert possible disaster?
it might be shift, I don’t remember.
Try something: before moving or copying anything, quit itunes and start it by holding whatever key (try each one, shift, control or alt, separately). If you get the prompt, then you can try to move the library folder altogether…