Introduction

Welcome to PowerTunes! Apple's iTunes program is popular and easy to use application that lets you organize your digital media. PowerTunes lets you take your organization to the next level while still being able to take advantage of iTunes great feature set. With PowerTunes, you can:

• Create mulitple iTunes libraries. iTunes requires you to put all of your music and video files into one giant, monolithic library. Playlists can help some with organization, but when your library grows to be extremely large, it can get very hard to manage. PowerTunes lets you create additional iTunes libraries, divide your music and video up between them as you see fit, and easily switch back and forth between your different libraries. You can have different libraries for different people who use your computer, you can split up your media based on category (e.g. put all your video in a separate library, or all your audiobooks), or even store your library on an external hard drive that you can then attach to another computer.
• Create multiple media folders. Not only does PowerTunes let you create multiple libraries, but each library can have its own media folder. This lets you easily store your media files on an external hard drive, on a network drive, or anywhere else you like. Multiple libraries can also share the same media folder, so you can keep all your music in one place while still being able to organize it among multiple libraries. PowerTunes automatically keeps track of which library uses which media folder, so you don't have to.
• Copy music and playlists between libraries. Since most of us already have a large amount of music in our iTunes library, PowerTunes provides several ways to let you move portions of your existing music and playlists to one of your newly created libraries. PowerTunes will keep your playlists intact, as well as copying over your ratings, play counts, volume adjustments, and other data that you've spent time assigning to your tracks in iTunes.
• Share libraries and music between multiple users. If you use multiple user accounts on your Mac, each user you have set up will have their own iTunes library, with separate music and separate playlists. PowerTunes lets you share a library and/or a media folder among multiple user accounts, so you don't need to have two copies of every track in order to allow all your users to be able to listen to your shared music collection.
• Clean up your library and media folder. PowerTunes includes tools that let you clean up your music collection, allowing you to find tracks in your library that have gone missing and either fix or delete them. You can also quickly scan your media folder for files that might not have made it into your iTunes library, and then either add them to your library or delete them to free up hard disk space.

You can visit the Table of Contents to get an overview of how PowerTunes works, or continue reading and learn more about iTunes libraries and media folders.