When I got my first iPod I was eager to see what all of the hype was about with this player. That is until I realized what a pain it is to keep your iTunes music library updated with the latest songs on your hard drive. I assumed that I would setup iTunes to basically monitor a folder or in my case an entire disk drive and it would add the music automatically anytime I added music to the folder/drive. Well much to my astonishment this was not the case, and the solution and the method in iTunes seemed very painful to say the least.

Off to the internet I went searching for a better method of updating my library. I ran across a free program called the iTunes Library Updater (iTLU) and as of this writing and me using iTunes version 7 it is still working flawlessly. I have setup a custom profile inside of iTLU with the rules I want it to use when updating my library as well as telling the program where my iTunes library XML file and my music files are located. After a quick setup I was able to have it update my library in a matter of minutes and I didn’t have to worry about remembering which new albums I have added.

This method worked great for awhile, until I would forget to run the process so I did a little more digging to see how I could automate the process and basically take the human (me in this case) out of the equation. The genius who released iTLU also released a GUI free version of the software. What this does is allows you to use the built in Windows Scheduled Tasks program to run iTLU at a specified time which you can then setup to be a recurring task such as daily or weekly.

I opened up the user manual for iTLU and read through the steps and explanations of what switches I needed to use in order to process my library using the same settings I did with the GUI. But wait, I then noticed that since I had saved all of my settings from the GUI in a iTLU profile I didn’t have to do anything with the switches. All I needed to do is tell it where to find my profile file and it would automatically load in the saved settings. Awesome!

So now every 3 days this process kicks off somewhere between kissing the wife good night and that stupid alarm waking me up for work in the morning. The best part is I no longer get the “did you add that album to iTunes yet?” questions like I did before.

Filed under: Apple, Software, itlu, itunes, library, update