More music-related advice required, good people

[Taunton Blue Genie]

Having learned one or two lessons the very hard way regarding failing iPods and crashing laptops I now have two iPod Classics and two different laptops, each with an external hard drive for the music tracks and on mp3 format - as I want exactly the same set up duplicated to avoid the painful process of losing my music and all the metadata I have added i.e. regarding the classification of each album in respect of genre, playlist etc.

As I am starting the process off anew, my question is: is it possible and/or desirable to download iTunes itself onto the external hard-drives rather on the laptops? As I understand it, the added metadata (mentioned above) resides in iTunes rather than in the music folders.

I hope that makes sense!

[bobh]

Get a Dansette, they play forever.

[rosetattoo]

Apparently the average life of a removable hard drive is 18 months unless of course its a sshd

[Taunton Blue Genie]

Apparently the average life of a removable hard drive is 18 months unless of course its a sshd

Are external hard drives the same as removable ones though in that respect? Both the external hard drives I have have lasted years - and if one fails I will always have the other one (which I will then copy and have a duplicate of).

[NYCBlue]

If you use iTunes, just get iTunes match. 99c a month. You can ditch the hard drives. And the iPods.

[Taunton Blue Genie]

If you use iTunes, just get iTunes match. 99c a month. You can ditch the hard drives. And the iPods.

Dependent on constantly accessing the internet presumably, something that I don't have when on my travels.

[TruBlue]

I don't have iTunes or use it so not totally sure of it's setup but couldn't you link it to something like Google Drive?

[lardy]

I don't have iTunes or use it so not totally sure of it's setup but couldn't you link it to something like Google Drive?

Apple linking with Google?

[NYCBlue]

Dependent on constantly accessing the internet presumably, something that I don't have when on my travels.

Approximately how many songs do you have? What kind of cell phone do you use?

[Taunton Blue Genie]

Approximately how many songs do you have? What kind of cell phone do you use?

I have over 10,000 songs and I like having the whole library with me in various environments, whether it be at home, in the garden, cycling, jogging or on my travels. I am therefore very happy with the two identical iPod Classics that I use.

[itkman]

Sign up for google music then install the google music helper and it'll (slowly) upload everything you have in iTunes to their servers and every time you add something new to iTunes it'll automatically upload to their servers. You can have 50,000 tracks on there for free.

You never have to use google music but all you music is there to download in the event of catastrophic failure of your hardware. And you can access your tunes from a web browser where ever you are.