Sharing Media on a mixed /windows Mac network

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Sharing Media on a mixed /windows Mac network

I have a Windows 7 PC (in my study) and Mac Mini (connected to my TV) both of which are connected to a home network. I keep all of my media on NAS storage so that it is accessible to both. I can easily see each machine on the other's network browser and I am able to access material the NAS drive from both. The problem is that I want to be able to access media such as photos, videos and music from each machine using either iTunes, iPhoto or windows media center to manage them.

I want to use both as I work with PCs and have the majority of my software on the PC e.g. Adobe suite etc. but I like to use the mac for more creative things as I find it much more user friendly functions for creating simple media projects.

I'm facing more and more duplication as iTunes music comes as m4a (i think) and WMC and any existing stuff I had is in mp3 format. I end up with duplicates of each file e.g. one song may come up in mp3, mp4 and m4a format in the same folder and therefore appears 3 times in iTunes. Also when using iTunes and iPhoto files are frequently flagged up as "missing".

Can anyone recommend best practice for making these coexist.

Thanks

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.6.2), Buffalo NAS storage; Windows 7 PC

Posted on Jul 26, 2010 8:03 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 27, 2010 4:46 AM in response to elgar22

elgar22 wrote:
I have a Windows 7 PC (in my study) and Mac Mini (connected to my TV) both of which are connected to a home network. I keep all of my media on NAS storage so that it is accessible to both. I can easily see each machine on the other's network browser and I am able to access material the NAS drive from both. The problem is that I want to be able to access media such as photos, videos and music from each machine using either iTunes, iPhoto or windows media center to manage them.

I want to use both as I work with PCs and have the majority of my software on the PC e.g. Adobe suite etc. but I like to use the mac for more creative things as I find it much more user friendly functions for creating simple media projects.

I'm facing more and more duplication as iTunes music comes as m4a (i think) and WMC and any existing stuff I had is in mp3 format. I end up with duplicates of each file e.g. one song may come up in mp3, mp4 and m4a format in the same folder and therefore appears 3 times in iTunes. Also when using iTunes and iPhoto files are frequently flagged up as "missing".

Can anyone recommend best practice for making these coexist.

Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7 and hence Windows Media Center can play both AAC (.m4a) and MP3 files. So can iTunes. Therefore you do not need to keep both MP3 and AAC versions of the same track but can stick to one for both. WMP12 now supports AAC as standard including reading the meta-tags even the embedded artwork.

Note: WMP cannot play protected AAC tracks which used to be sold on the iTunes Store - Apple no longer protect the music tracks on the iTunes Store so this is no longer a problem.

For sharing photos, this is more difficult. One option would be to use a Mac with iPhoto to organise the photos and then on a Mac run a UPnP server like the following

Elgato EyeConnect see http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyeconnect
Allegro Media Server see http://www.allegrosoft.com/ams.html
TwonkyMedia see http://www.twonkyvision.de/
MediaTomb see http://mediatomb.cc/
Cidero (Java) see http://www.cidero.com/radioServer.html
Cyber Media Gate (Java) see http://www.cybergarage.org/net/cmgate/java/index.html
PyMedS see http://resnet.uoregon.edu/~gurney_j/jmpc/pymeds.html
Playback see http://yazsoft.com/products/playback/
MediaLink see http://www.nullriver.com/products/medialink
Philips Media Manager see http://misc.philips.com/streamium/us/streamiumpmmdownload.html

to share the photos from the Mac. WMP can then connect to the Mac UPnP server.

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