Problems when using my Apple Airport Extreme Base Station with and external HD as an iTunes library

Question

I have my entire music collection on an external HD which I connect to my network through a direct USB connection with my Apple base station. I'm finding that iTunes struggles to load the library (43,000 files - some of which are hour long podcasts/mixes etc) and I've also purchased TuneUp to tidy up my music collection, but given that iTunes struggles to load in the first place, this avenue isn't even worth considering right now.

Does anyone have suggestions on how I might improve the setup? What connection between the base station and the external HD would give the best result?

It isn't practical to connect the drive directly to my PC as I'm using a laptop for my main machine, plus I'd like for the setup to work when I'm not at home so my partner can use her iPad or iPhone to browse/play the music.

UPDATE: The iTunes library is on my machine running Win 7 as opposed to on the external HD.

Answer 1

Your library is uncommonly large. Split your library into several smaller libraries, organized by content, and switch between them, or find a replacement for iTunes that is designed to work well with the size of your library. See this link for instructions:

http://www.tipb.com/2011/01/31/daily-tip-multiple-itunes-libraries-single-windows-mac-pc/

I can tell you from personal experience that you shouldn't have any loading problems with a library containing 8000 items (wirelessly from your laptop), so consider splitting your library into 5 or 6 separate libraries if you plan on sticking with iTunes.

Answer 2

I have similar problems and found the following workaround: iTunes keeps the path to its music/mediafiles in the preferences/advanced. However, when it cannot access that path, e.g. while you're away from home (or the external drive is down for any reason), it resets that path to point to the local hard disk on your laptop! I find that very annoying, because it urges me to manually reset the path AND will make iTunes updating the entire library accordingly. The latter takes for me at least 10minutes each time. I asked Apple a couple of times already but without result.