Will new iTunes purchases be downloaded to new external drive?

Tim Dobson shared this question 11 years ago
Answered

I have spanned my home movies folder, movies folder and tv shows folder to an external drive. But when I buy new movies on iTunes will they be downloaded to the new location?


Secondly can you develop a version of TuneSpan for iPhoto library? I've 80 GB of photos which it would be useful to have on an external drive.


Fantastic product though. Well done.

Replies (1)

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Sorry to say, no. New files will not be automatically added to the external drive. This is because TuneSpan does not change or affect the behavior of iTunes. Any newly added media or purchased content will be added to the default iTunes Media folder as normal.


After you add new media, you can regularly launch up TuneSpan every few weeks or so to span out new media. But, you don't need to worry about narrowing down to find only unspanned media, if you want all your Movies spanned, you can just add all the movies to the spanning queue, and only unspanned media will be spanned for speed and efficiency.


Automatic Spanning has been a highly requested feature, but how I'm planning on implementing it will still not be able to send new files directly to the external drive. But, I hope to make this process simpler. Allowing users to set criteria for what they want where, and then when you launch TuneSpan after new media has been added in the set criteria, you will get an alert to span them and just need to click one button to start the span. I hope to work on this throughout this year, but it is a complex feature which will take time to create and test to handle all situations. I can't give a deadline for Automatic Spanning at this point.


If you want ALL new media to be added to the external drive, you can change your default iTunes Media folder in iTunes, but that would affect everything, music, movies, etc. There is no way to select a default location for just one media type or any criteria. If there was, TuneSpan would not really be necessary :-)


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Secondly, I'm sorry to say that a "PhotoSpan" type application would not be possible.


The file organization is quite a bit more complex with multiple versions of photos etc (thumbnails, originals, modified versions).


But, most importantly, TuneSpan relies on an AppleScript command available in iTunes which allows the ability to set locations of tracks. There is an equivalent property in iPhoto, but only to GET the location of a photo, not SET the location of a photo.


So, to my knowledge, it can't be done. The best alternative I know of are things like iPhoto Library Manager, which allows you to create and manage multiple iPhoto Libraries in different locations.


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Thanks so much for getting in touch, I'm sorry I can't give better news at this point, but I hope that TuneSpan can still help you get to the media setup that you want.


Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any other questions.

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