I use a mac and iphone, therefore I use iTunes. Unfortunately, it’s the easiest solution to music management for the mac and iPhone.
I have a Time Capsule as well, which I use to store my music data, and this can be mounted to my laptop using AFP.
I also have an external hard drive, which contains a mirror of my music data, which I rsync from the Time Capsule weekly.
Being a unix variant, macos has the concept of symbolic links and I thought I could just use this feature to switch the path to my music between the Time Capsule or my external hard drive. Simple, replace a single symbolic link, and my music magically comes from a different backing store.
Unfortunately, iTunes resolves symbolic links when you add files to its library. So my symbolic link idea doesn’t work as well as I had hoped.
Bring in titl, Tools for iTunes Libraries. A not-very-well-written library to modify the binary iTunes library file. Once I hacked around the Java, I managed to get it to do what I wanted, and I now have a script which backs up my iTunes library file, finds/replaces paths and allows me to switch the source of my music data.
All because iTunes resolves symbolic links before storing paths.