2.  Now let's look at your preferences. Open iTunes from your Applications folder. Select Preferences from the iTunes menu bar and then select Advanced to pull up this screen.

You need to change your Music folder location to that external had drive. I also recommend making an alias or shortcut (see screen shot) of your big MP3 hard drive and replacing the iTunes folder in your Music folder with this alias.

So copy your music folder to the external drive. Then make an alias/shorcut and put that shortcut in your Music foler inside your user folder.

3.  Don't close the Preferences window yet. Click on the Importing icon. Change your Import Using setting to AAC Encoder. What's AAC and why you should care? Well AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is a cutting-edge audio codec. AAC encoding compresses much more efficiently than older formats like MP3 (which iTunes still supports, by the way), while delivering quality rivaling that of uncompressed CD audio. In fact, expert listeners have judged AAC audio files compressed at 128 kbps (stereo) to be virtually indistinguishable from the original uncompressed audio source. Go above 128

AAC vs. MP3 Bottom Line: AAC is better quality and has a smaller file size than MP3. More music, less hard drive space, better quality.

AAC Drawbacks: Not fully supported on various hardware platforms (see step four for more info).

5.  So you are probably saying "Oh crap. I have thousands of MP3 songs, what do I do now that there's AAC?" Unfortunately you only have two options and you won't like either of them. You can either recompress your already compressed MP3 files within iTunes (it's not really a good idea to recompress anything if you really like quality music). The other option is to re-encode your CDs as AAC files.

When you try to import a CD that you've already imported, you should get this screen. Choose Replace Existing to replace your old MP3 files with new AAC files. You might have to go in there a manually delete some stuff (see screen shot).

6.  Get a program to automatically add artwork to your massive music collection. There are many programs out there that can add artwork to your music. Here's a couple for OSX:

Fetch Art for iTunes is a small program that will fetch album art for one or more songs using Amazon's XML interface, allow you to preview the art that was found, and add the art you want to iTunes. The program is controlled through the iTunes Script menu: once it is installed, album art can be downloaded by selecting one or more songs in iTunes and choosing "Fetch Art" from the Script menu. Download now.

Clutter is a small application that lets you put music CDs on your desktop. You can drag them anywhere, they're really windows. Line them up neatly or put them in piles, it's your choice. Each one looks like the real CD's cover, and double-clicking it tells iTunes to play that CD. Think of Clutter as an alternate user interface to your music collection. When deciding what to play next, instead of searching through a huge alphabetical list, let your eye roam over the covers of your favorite CDs and those you've been listening to recently. Download Now.

Clutter is a pretty cool program. It works by access Amazon.com's CD image database. For example if you are listening to "Love Song" off of Tesla's RePlugged Live CD, Clutter will add the album artwork to all songs on that album. Companion programs like Clutter must be open at the same time as iTunes. If you are feeling ambitious, you can write a little AppleScript (Mac only) to open iTunes and Clutter at the same time. We can send you a script if you want one. Just drop a dime into our Beer Fund.

Beer Fund