When I first started using iTunes many years ago it seemed like my 150gb internal hard disk would be more than enough to store all my music, and for a while it was. I converted all of my music CDs, and my wife’s, and added them to iTunes, there was a stagering 45gb of music stored on my computer (45gb seemed like a lot at the time).
This was fine for a while but one day something else happened. Apple started offering TV shows and films directly from the iTunes store, these new files took up much more space than music files so we invested in an external hard drive to store the new media and invested in a macmini to hook up to the TV.
In order to select the library on the external disk all you have to do is press the alt(option) key when you click the iTunes icon and it allows you to select different libraries but the problem was that the keyboard for the macmini was out of reach and out of site of the kids, so this became a major pain in the backside.
It was then that I started looking around for alternative and found a few programs that would allow you to interact with multiple iTunes libraries, but most of them had other limitations, and some even decided to delete the iTunes library (thank you backup). After some more searching and when all hope seemed lost I came across PowerTunes.
PowerTunes was the program that I had been searching for, the first time I launched it I realised that it was love at first sight and that we would spend the rest of our lives together. The program allows you to create and manage iTunes libraries from multiple locations, at the moment it manages 5 different libraries in our household from 5 different locations, and it works perfectly every time.
The interface is user friendly, you get to browse the different libraries from this one central point and then launch a specific library with all its content. I highly recommend you download their demo and try it out, you can visit their website here.
This application is great, and we are now able to manage multiple iTunes libraries from one central point, if the children want to watch a film and the last library used was the one I use for all my scifi collection, they are able to easily select their library and all this with only the mouse, no need to type, click click and that’s it. Great!