importing from network drive

iTunes has a setting in Preferences>Advanced where you can uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to Library". Perhaps that will help.

Have you tried saving video there and playing back over the network? I've just posted a problem with this: iTunes hangs a bit while playing back video. It's incredibly frustrating. I want to store video centrally and stream to various machines. The "stuttering" is making this ineffective.

iMac 24" Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2Mb RAM, Invidia 7600GT

I've had similar problems, I'll see if this advanced setting thing will help. My objective is to have my "Master iLibrary" on an external hard drive connected to a new airport extreme wireless network in my house. Then all three household laptops can access our extensive ilibrary without using hard drive space on the laptops, and wirelessly to boot. In addition I want to be able to connect all three ipods (and hopefully an iphone come June:) to any one of the three laptops to access this very large music library (50GB). It seems to me that by trying to protect copyright for the artist the honest end consumer gets hosed. I can't seem to get the album art for many of my songs seemingly because of my unwillingness to re-import hundreds and hundreds of CDs that I have boxed up in the attic. The album art isn't anything more than an issue of asthetics where as deleteing ten thousand songtitles when itunes repopulates my library is enough to make a laptop grow wings and fly across the room. I hope that technology heads toward more continuity for music junkies. I've been trying to find the right device, software and format for my extensive collection of music. I started with musicmatch jukebox and got agrivated then used WMP out of forced convinience. Now I have moved to itunes because apple "seems" to be developing what the consumer wants instead of telling the consumer what they are going to get. I haven't even begun to convert my cassettes, vinyl, or 8 tracks. That is a nightmare waiting in the wings. Anyone with advice in the way of a turnkey operation for my planned setup? I believe that what I am trying to do is very likely the desire of most consumers. If Apple gets this worked out and user friendly I'd bet they'll take over the majority marketshare as fast as they can handle it if not faster.

I just checked to see if the preference setting would help and found that I already had this unchecked. I realise you sugested this for someone elses perhaps slightly different problem. I just wanted to post that this preference setting change would not to correct the library repopulating issue.