Many audiophiles who use iTunes as their principal music library tend
to be individuals who accumulate large music collections. I myself have
close to 30,000 tracks. However, I have heard from many BitPerfect
users who have as many as 75,000 tracks. A friend of mine has close to
7,000 CDs arrayed across many, many storage shelves, so I can see how
that would be possible.
When
you have a collection that big, your best solution is to store the music
off-line, on an external HD or, better still, a NAS (which is my
preferred solution). When it comes to iTunes, this naturally raises the
issues of whether or not to allow iTunes to copy your music into your
Media Folder upon import, and whether or not to allow it to Organize
your music fielder for you. Both of those features are implemented as
check boxes in the Advanced tab of iTunes’ Preferences menu. When you
start off using iTunes, and you have a small music collection, having
iTunes do all the heavy lifting for you can be a bonus, but eventually
you reach the point where you are no longer happy with the way iTunes
does things and you want to do it yourself. Most BitPerfect users -
myself included - fall into this camp. There is no way I’m letting
iTunes organize my music for me
However, if you are happy letting iTunes do all the organizing of your
Music Library, then there are some things you need to be aware of when
using DSD Master.
DSD Master has a neat feature which allows
you to automatically import the files it has created into iTunes.
However, if you have iTunes set to “Copy files to iTunes Media Folder
when adding to the library”, you will need to look out for a couple of
things. First, if you set DSD Master’s output directory to be, for
example, a folder on your Desktop, then after the files have all been
created and successfully imported into iTunes, you will have duplicates
of each - one in the folder on your Desktop and the other somewhere in
your iTunes Media folder. You won’t need both copies, so you can safely
delete the original one on your Desktop. Of course, if you specify the
iTunes Media folder as DSD Master’s output directory this problem goes
away completely.
An interesting thing happens if you choose to
check iTunes setting “Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized”. This does
two things. First, it organizes the music files in the iTunes Media
folder into folders by Artist, and sub-folders by Album. This
information is gleaned from the metadata in the music files during the
import process. Secondly, it is also liable to rename the files
according to some internal Apple logic. At this point, I don’t know
what that logic is, but if you are creating Hybrid-DSD files, these will
be renamed from “filename.DSDh.m4a” to “filename.m4a”. There will be
no loss in functionality, but if you were hoping to rely on the “.DSDh.”
to identify the Hybrid-DSD files in future, then this useful feature
will be lost.
Thanks to BitPerfect User Eric Tan for drawing my attention to this.