Is there a limit on the number of songs you can have in iTunes 7?

i have a macbook pro running 10.4.8 with just over 11,000 songs and everything runs fine. I have put the entire library on an external HD and it all seems to be fine. A friend of mine is running itunes with 35,000 without any probs..... no idea how much you can force on it though!

According to the posts I've read, some people have a single library of 200 - 500 GB (some even more) and that doesn't give problems.
As libraries and the number of Smart Playlists grow, the performance will slow down however.
If you also experience decrease in performance, which with your library size does not seem very likely to me, you can create multiple libraries.

Before running iTunes, press and hold the Option-key until you see a window giving you a choice to create another one.
You can also use Libra or iTunes Library Manager to create multiple libraries.
These apps. also save the preferences for each library, which iTunes doesn't.

Hope this helps.

M

17' iMac 800 MHz, 768 MB RAM, 200 GB HD, DL burner Mac OS X (10.4.8) iTunes 7.0.1

My G5 has over 35,000 songs with more than 40 normal and smart playlists. No problems and when my collection was handled by a G4 (and a thousand songs lighter) it was fine too.

I'm gonna say no to the library size problem! W/ over 200+ gigs and 43000+ songs I am still running itunes. W/ that said it's slow!!! It takes forever to start up and shut down sometimes 14 min. plus! I don't think there is a limit but you sure don't want a big library. Best workable option I've heard yet is to make multiple libraries to keep things small. A lot of my problem is itunes 7. Things were never this slow w/ itunes 6! Maybe it's time to look for a different player.....

You can sync multiple iPods with one library:
How to use multiple iPods with one computer.

iTunes doesn't know about multiple libraries. You have to tell iTunes which library to use.
If the library was created by iTunes, holding the Option-key on launching iTunes, will enable a menu to choose one.

If you want to switch to another library, quit iTunes and launch again while holding the Option-key

If you created multiple libraries with one of the 3rd party applications I mentioned in my previous post, you have to quit iTunes too, run the app. and launch iTunes again.

The difference is that these apps. not only save the 'iTunes Library' file, but also the preferences file.
iTunes can only manage one library at a time. That's why you have to quit and relaunch.

You can manually manage your iPod with multiple libraries.
It's about the same as described in this article:
Using iPod with multiple computers

M

17' iMac 800 MHz, 768 MB RAM, 200 GB HD, DL burner Mac OS X (10.4.8) iTunes 7.0.1