Switching between several iTunes libraries
I wanted to distribute my mp3 collection over several drives, which is not well supported by iTunes. The article Switch between two iTunes Libraries describes an approach how to set this up, but this is a bit too complicated. Here is my approach.
I create a few directories on different disks to hold the libraries, e.g.
mkdir /Volumes/Disk1/Music/Classical mkdir /Volumes/Disk2/Music/Popular
I create symbolic links to these directories from my ~/Music directory:
ln -s /Volumes/Disk1/Music/Classical ~/Music ln -s /Volumes/Disk2/Music/Popular ~/Music
These are just to have a handy reference to the various library locations.
If there is an existing ~/Music/iTunes directory, remove it or move it to a different location.
Then to switch I keep a terminal window open in which I first switch to the Music directory:
cd ~/Music
and then, after possibly quitting a currently running iTunes, type either
ln -fhs Classical iTunes
or
ln -fhs Popular iTunes
and restart iTunes.