How do you effeicently downloading movies in iTunes for storage on external drive?

Question

How do you effeicently downloading movies in iTunes for storage on external drive?

I recently changed to a new computer. I want to download my iTunes media collection (mostly movies) but store on a separate external drive. The local C:\ drive cannot handle the number of movies. I have figured out how to have iTunes point to an external drive (and keep it pointed there getting past a known default folder bug). However and here is the rub, downloading movies when iTunes media folder is pointed to an external drive is painfully slow - snail paced slow - like 15 to 20 hours slow. Also there is nearly 100% failure or movie corruption rate. This is not a performance problem in the external drive itself. This is mostly an iTunes issue because of the way it downloads files and interacts with disk drives.

How can I effect a Workaround?

I have an idea for a workaround but not sure how to implement. I want to download a handful of movies at a time to the internal C:\ drive and then move/transfer the movies to the eternal drive D:\ and then repeat until I can get the complete library downloaded. I can have a library on the C:\ drive and a library on the D:\ drive and swap between the libraries by holding Shift Key when starting iTunes. So, in theory I can download with the Library active on C:\ drive. I can then manually move/copy the files to the D:\ drive.

Is there a way to get the media library configuration (database) on D:\ drive to pickup or recognize the new movies appearing in its folder when I change iTunes to point to the external drive?

Performance Background C Drive:

Downloading movies with iTunes media folder pointed to c:\ drive is fairly fast. A 4 GB movie takes about 6 minutes. The network download speed is in the varying range of 50 MB/s to 130 MB/s on a network and computer capable of handling 500 MB/s. The disk write is as fast as iTunes can download. File download is constrained by iTunes and Apple's stream to my computer. The internet network provider is not a factor. The computer speed and performance is not a factor. The constraint (taking 4 minutes) is simply a factor of how fast iTunes is getting data from Apple (50 MB/s to 130 MB/s).

Performance Background D Drive:

Downloading movies with iTunes media folder pointed to d:\ (external) is supper slow. The same 4 GB movie will take about 15 to 20 hours and always fails. The network download speed drops 7 to 5 MB/s while the disk write drops to miserable 800 KB/s or about 1/600 the true capability of this disk's write transaction speed.

The file download is now constrained by iTunes working with an external drive (not the network). Again, the drive by itself is not the problem. This drive and the computer USB device interface is configured to be >1GB can and will sustain >600 to 800 MB/s write speeds. I have seen the drive maintain >100 MB/s with complicated application read/write file interactions. So an 800 KB/s disk drive write speed appears to be iTunes having a very complicated and overly sophisticated interaction on the external drive.

Windows, Windows 10

Posted on Nov 2, 2023 7:01 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 3, 2023 5:55 PM in response to michael emerald

Not sure if it's the same thing but....

I have a LOT of music on my 10Tb HDD - and even when i import just one new music track, iTunes whirrs away just as you describe, reading most of the drive!!! before finally doing the import. I also have 100s of smart playlists so I put it down to iTunes doing a lot of internal data management to maintain the database - once in I'm often amazed how quick iTunes works to find a track or etc - so i'm happy with the upfront time penalty for quick operation in use.

However my movies imports are much different - they load much quicker even though i have 2 20Tb HDDs - and i put that down to a over a million music tracks but far fewer movies (I still have loads of smart playlists for movies - each actor gets one!) - so the data management burden is much less cos there's less items - even though each one is approx 1Gb (i use 720p mp4s) - so a movie import is almost immediate, especially as my C: is now an SDD after last computer gave up the ghost...) - and all the data management is done on the .itl file on C:.

In fact that's leads me to another thought - do you have/need the .itl file on the external drive? That will certainly slow things down with large media libraries.

Put the .itl files on C: and all media on the C: or the HDD -as you wish, it should be much quicker, esp if C: is an SDD.

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Answer 2

muguy

Level 10

91,430 points

Nov 2, 2023 7:31 PM in response to michael emerald

I cannot say I've had the same issue. My external media is kept on an external drive and movie downloads take a few minutes at most.

But, your workaround is to unplug the drive from your computer. Open iTunes. Download movies. close iTunes. Plug the drive back in then open iTunes. Then use the organize library command to copy all of your files to the external drive. Delete the ones on your hard drive once done.

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Answer 3

Nov 3, 2023 8:49 AM in response to michael emerald

I'm not sure if this helps (it probably depends on where you are downloading from). I have my films on 2 HDDs - I import into iTunes first to a specific playlist Actually on a 3rd HDD)... once in iTunes, I then copy the films to the appropriate HDD outside of iTunes (in explorer).

The locations on all three disks are identical (X:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\... (makes the programming easier)) and although at this point iTunes can't find the media... but i've got some VBA code that scans a playlist (or selection) and sets the film location to the correct drive... eg

E: for Music

J: for Films and

K: for TV movies

I have one library file (.itl) on C: - which is now an SDD so everything works much faster.

Only one minor issue, everytime I open iTunes the default location resets to C:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media, and I have to change it everytime in preferences to E:...

Does your statement "I have figured out how to have iTunes point to an external drive (and keep it pointed there getting past a known default folder bug)" mean you have sorted this - or is it something else?

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Answer 4

turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Nov 8, 2023 7:06 AM in response to michael emerald

How have you persuaded iTunes to use your preferred media folder? If you've used a redirection trick of some sort that may be part of your problem. Do you have any anti-virus software? Excluding the iTunes and/or iTunes Media folder may help.

There is a bug in some builds of iTunes that, at least for some users, seems to stop the media folder preference from being saved properly. See Make a split library portable - Apple Community and put your library in a shape that isn't affected by the issue, and is easier to backup and move around in future.

Ideally your library would be at X:\iTunes and your media folder at X:\iTunes\iTunes Media where X: is the drive where you want to store your media.

tt2

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Answer 5

Nov 3, 2023 5:15 PM in response to muguy

Thanks for your feedback.

Your comment that you can download to an external drive in a few minutes now has me wondering what is really going on. I did further detail drive analysis.

iTunes doesn't even seem to be trying to write to the drive very fast. The drive is 93% idle.
iTunes seems to be reading from the drive almost as much as writing to it (which sort of makes sense except for #3 next).
iTunes, my drive and Window 11 in combination is putting as much read/write and file administration function stress (open/close, seek/find, read/write ect) download as if it was creating 400,000 individual files for a single movie download, but just at a very slow speed thus the 15 to 20 hours and 93% idle.

This just makes me think something is not right.

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Answer 6

Nov 15, 2023 8:15 PM in response to martin1662

The local C:\ drive isn't big enough to hold my movie collection. The external drive is a SDD with the capability to read/write more than 600 times what Apple is doing. To put this in perspective, the very first movie downloaded, on a completely new computer with a new install of iTunes took 16 hours to download and it was corrupted. Downloads only work with iTunes database being on the local c:\ drive thus I want to download to c:\ and then transfer to d:\ drive. A 4G movie copy from c:\ to d:\ takes only about 10 seconds. I could move my entire collection from c:\ to d:\ in the time it takes to download just one movie, if I can just find a way to download a batch of movies, move and download another batch.

It has been my experience is the .itl file has to be in the same folder as the media or it doesn't work right.

This all comes back to when Apple removes movies from its catalog. If a movie gets removed and you haven't downloaded it, then it is gone forever. Apple warns that all media has to be downloaded to be accessible. I have lost several moves because of their catalog changes, so I embarked on downloading my whole collection. It hasn't worked out.

I miss the days movies releasing to DVDs.

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Answer 7

Nov 3, 2023 5:14 PM in response to muguy

Thanks for your suggestion. It is worth exploring.

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Answer 8

Nov 15, 2023 8:17 PM in response to turingtest2

Yes I have been able to get the media and .itl database on the same external drive. It doesn't make a difference. I even installed iTunes itself on the external drive. No improvement.

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How do you effeicently downloading movies in iTunes for storage on external drive?

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