A tip for iTunes users

I learned a cool little trick with iTunes today. I remember a while back I looked for a long time for a way to have two iTunes libraries on the same Windows account, but couldn't find anything. Well I was Stumbling today and I found a little tutorial on how to do it. It's not terribly convenient for switching between libraries (ideally I think there would be a function in iTunes itself to switch between libraries) but oh well.

How it works is you select an iTunes icon (on your desktop for example, doesn't work in the Start Menu) then you hold down Shift and press Enter, holding down shift as iTunes loads. Then it takes you to a screen that says to choose a library, then you just click on create a library, go to a folder you want the new library to be located (easiest to put it in the same directory your first library is in) then it just creates it. Now it starts iTunes and you have a new library. Whenever you want to switch libraries you just do that again, but instead of creating a new one you just click the other button, to find one that already exists.

Most people won't need to do this, but if you have an iPod it's pretty useful. I have thousands of MP3s and while most are sorted (the tags are how I like them, so that they display properly on the iPod) there are some that aren't. So I have a Sorted folder and an Unsorted folder, so I'm using the 2nd iTunes library for my Unsorted folder, as my primary one only has the Sorted folder because it's linked to my iPod.

Enjoy!

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