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A warning about iTunes, backups, and bought music
Authored by: Fofer on May 10, '04 03:25:09PM

That's because you burned to DVD, simply as "Data."

There's a format called "MP3 CD" -- you can fit hundreds of songs on a CD-R, and play them natively in some CD Players that support MP3 playback. It's basically an ISO9600 disk with the MP3 files in a flat folder structure. That said, since these MP3 CD players wouldn't be able to playback the AAC or AACp files, iTunes is now smart enough to omit them.

Moral of the story is that Apple is trying to accommodate the old and the new. If all you want to do is backup your files (MP3, AAC and AACp) then use the "data" option, CD or DVD.



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A warning about iTunes, backups, and bought music
Authored by: Fofer on May 10, '04 03:28:20PM

(and by "data option" I mean, burn the files/folders in the Finder... manually.) Aw crap, this means that iTunes can't break it up for you automatically by size of destination format. (7 GB of music onto 10 CD-R's or 2 DVD-R's, etc.)

Oh well, I guess that's what an external HD backup is for. ;)



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A warning about iTunes, backups, and bought music
Authored by: CaptCosmic on May 10, '04 03:54:46PM

Try creating a new Smart Playlist and tell it to select 650MB worth of songs by Album. This playlist will contain the first CD worth of music, so name it CD1 or something similar.

Now, create a second Smart Playlist, but set the criteria to Playlist not CD1. Tell this playlist to select 650MB worth of songs by Albums. You should get a second playlist that picks up right where the first left off.

Additional CDs can be created using the same method with a criteria that the song not be in any prior playlist. Not the most efficient method, but it achieves the goal.

For DVDs, change the Size to 4.7GB.

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Capt Cosmic



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A warning about iTunes, backups, and bought music
Authored by: Dale Sorel on May 10, '04 04:41:25PM

A disc made using the MP3 method will also play in most DVD players.



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A warning about iTunes, backups, and bought music
Authored by: osxpounder on May 10, '04 11:35:53PM

It's more like 4.23GB for me.

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osxpounder



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image and segment music folder
Authored by: jasont on May 10, '04 07:52:38PM

There should be someway to do something like this (if this hint hasn't been posted somewhere else):

make an image of your music folder (disk copy expert mode, toast, disk utility...etc)...

Then run split (I got this part from the project gutenberg dvd parts readme so you may need to change it also here we're using iso which we probably don't want).

something like
split --bytes=4700m --suffix-length=4 music.iso music.iso.

(you may need to go down to less than 4.7M or use a different format (ex a few more zeros and k or even b) depending on your media)

So now you should have all your autogenerated 'parts' which you burn to dvd and then when you get them back to your restore drive you do something like

cat music.iso.???? > music.iso

and you get back your big huge folder.

It's not as fast as the playlist solution and it relies on you having some drive space and some time(although this could probably be worked somehow imaging and segmenting at the same time)...but it does automatically calc data size for you based on media.

I haven't tried this one yet.



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image and segment music folder
Authored by: Graff on May 11, '04 03:35:44AM

You can do this through hdiutil, which comes with a standard install of Mac OS X. I'm assuming that you are using at least Mac OS X 10.2 here.

If you want to make a set of CDs or DVDs then run these commands to make the set. You would then take the resulting image files and burn them using Disk Utility or some other CD burning software.

Here are the commands to make a CD set, it assumes that 650 megabytes will be small enough to fit on a CD. Remember that a CD will hold less than its printed size due to differences in how the bytes are counted and what the filesystem takes up:

hdiutil create -ov -srcfolder /Users/username/Music/iTunes -volname 'Music Backup' /tmp/musicbackup.dmg
mkdir ~/Desktop/music\ backup
hdiutil segment -o ~/Desktop/music\ backup/musicbackup -segmentSize 650m /tmp/musicbackup.dmg
rm /tmp/musicbackup.dmg

Here are the commands to make a DVD set, it assumes that 4.2 gigabytes will be small enough to fit on a DVD:

hdiutil create -ov -srcfolder /Users/username/Music/iTunes -volname 'Music Backup' /tmp/musicbackup.dmg
mkdir ~/Desktop/music\ backup
hdiutil segment -o ~/Desktop/music\ backup/musicbackup -segmentSize 4300m /tmp/musicbackup.dmg
rm /tmp/musicbackup.dmg

The size for the DVD set is 4300 megabytes because a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes so 4.2 GiB = 4300.8 MiB.

It can take a while to create the master image in the first command. On my PowerMac G5 dual 2 gHz a music library of approximately 8.4 gigs took about 15 minutes for the first command.



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