File Server advice

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Level 1

9 points

File Server advice

I'm looking for a reasonable solution to my situation. I have an external hard drive with about 200G of music. I have a windows desktop, dual 1.8 G5, and two iBooks in the house. I'm trying to decide the best way to file serve the music so that it is simple for everyone to access the music. I've been sharing the music folder on the Windows machine and this works but I'm wondering if anyone has any better suggestions. It's a little bit tough for my wife to stream the audio and constantly update her library to make sure her iBook has all the latest additions I make to the main library.

G5 dual 1.8 and iBook G4 12", Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Mar 15, 2006 10:35 AM

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Answer 1

Cohi

Level 1

139 points

Mar 16, 2006 1:43 PM in response to Keeks

Have you tried the iTunes music sharing?

On the music server, i.e. the machine with the harddisk you run iTunes with all songs in the library, and turn on "Share My Music".

On all other computers you let iTunes look for shared music. They will then show the library (and playlists?) from the server, and you can listen to everything (but, in iTunes, not copy anything).

Quad G5 / Mini G4 / PB15 G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

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Answer 2

Keeks Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 17, 2006 8:13 AM in response to Keeks

That sounds like a much better way to do it. I never thought of that. I was just sharing the folder through windows. Will this keep the library dynamically then? When I add music it will automatically show up in iTunes on each computer?

Thanks for the idea!

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Answer 3

Cohi

Level 1

139 points

Mar 17, 2006 9:38 AM in response to Keeks

Yes! I just tried it 😉

All computers immediately pick up all changes to the servers' library.

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Answer 4

Keeks Author

Level 1

9 points

Mar 17, 2006 11:23 AM in response to Cohi

I just tried it too and it works good. The only issue I see with it is that you can't burn CDs from the shared library. The way I did it before was to open the folder on the network and then call it that folder the main library on each computer. Your way works a lot better because I'm adding music all the time and then I don't have to help my wife reload the library. I'll just have to burn stuff for her which is less frequent. I'm going to leave it on the windows box though so it isn't accessing my Mac desktop all the time while I'm using pro tools.

Thanks again!

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