Music Storage / Playback Suggestions?

[PortlandMacUser]

I'm in the process of ripping all my CDs to my PB and I'm looking for some suggestions on the eventual storage and playback of my music. I think what I would like to do is store it all on an external hard drive and playback through the stereo with Airport Express. I would probably get a iPod Mini or Shuffle to take music with me.

My main concern is backing up my music files in case something awful happens to the external. I'll eventually have close to 100 GB of music files, probably more in the future.

Anything wrong with this scenario, or do you have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[hob]

I'm interested in something similar... I have a 40GB internal HDD and a 150GB external, also a 20GB iPod. Somehow I want to be able to juggle my 25GB music library without putting it at risk... Some of it I wouldn't mind losing but most of it I need!!

Hob

[LifeIsCheap]

Okay, well I love my music and have got a modest collection of mp3s (~8000 compared to 100Gb :eek: ). I've been looking at the best way to share these between my iBook and my PC laptop such that I can stream music from my external drive no matter what computer I use and where I am in the house. This is a bit of a problem because the external HD needs power which is not particularly wireless yet.

I ended up getting a Netgear wireless media router (http://www.netgear.com/products/details/WGT634U.php) which I can plug my external drive into the back of and that can share the contents of the drive a la Windows networking. Unfortunately the router is pretty picky about the drive that it can share and it didn't like my DIY case+Seagate drive so I ended up getting a Maxtor One Touch that works perfectly.

This enables me to stream my iTunes library and misc videos to either laptop (drive is formatted FAT32 out of the box). Tomorrow my Airport Express should arrive from Apple so that I can then sit anywhere in my apartment and control what I listen to by choosing a song from iTunes in my iBook, streaming from the media router and playing on the hifi via the AE! It all works so far :)

So what do I do with my non-Netgear compliant drive? Backup the 80Gb of media files I have. Copies on DIY disk and the Maxtor. Overall, safe, wireless and an awesome selection of tunes!

Keep your fingers crossed that the AE does the bizz tomorrow...

[howard]

how fast is transferring with that thing? going from your computer wirelessly through a router to a harddrive

[harris.andrew]

Hi, I've been in a similar situation (well, 30GB of music which I thought was a whole lot, 100G . . . wow lol)

I got a generic Seagate firewire external, 200GB, plus backed stuff up on DVD. The backing up on DVD was half a day's worth of trips to get the DVD-Rs etc . . . but not too bad.

Airport wireless worked pretty flawlessly, and only required one configuration from within iTunes, it's at the bottom of the main UI screen, a selection menu to choose output to computer or to the airport. Very easy, takes 2 seconds.

The more complicated part was getting my bluetooth PDA to operate as a remote lol . . . that was pretty haX0r-ish though.

[PortlandMacUser]

Great idea to back up on DVDs, I hadn't considered that obvious possibility. As far as a Bluetooth remote goes, I hear a lot about Salling Clicker, but I use Romeo (http://www.irowan.com/romeo/) on my T610, which does just fine for me. Best of all, it's freeware, which lets you try it out first.

[LifeIsCheap]

how fast is transferring with that thing? going from your computer wirelessly through a router to a harddrive

Not sure on the actual speed I get although being a 'g' network I should be getting up to 54mbs. I tested it with iTunes and got flawless playback. I then tested it from my PC laptop streaming an mpeg video which worked perfectly as well.

I'll be curious to see how it works with the AE as the throughput on the iBook will be greater i.e. streaming in from the hard drive then out again to the AE via the router. Fingers crossed I still get enough bandwidth...

[LifeIsCheap]

Not sure on the actual speed I get although being a 'g' network I should be getting up to 54mbs. I tested it with iTunes and got flawless playback. I then tested it from my PC laptop streaming an mpeg video which worked perfectly as well.

I'll be curious to see how it works with the AE as the throughput on the iBook will be greater i.e. streaming in from the hard drive then out again to the AE via the router. Fingers crossed I still get enough bandwidth...

Got the whole setup working last night:
- External drive connected to the Netgear router and shared via windoze networking
- AE configured to join the network and connected to my stereo via the optical cable
- Shifted my iTunes library to the external drive (had to reimport the whole darn thing for iTunes to understand where it was... grrrrr.... took ages over the network)
- Played a tune and....

IT WORKS!

I can now play music from my PC laptop or iBook with zero cables interconnecting external hard drive, iBook and stereo! Perfect. There's a little lag when starting to play a song and betweeen tracks but I haven't experimented too much with the buffering or crossfading yet.

Next stop, 2nd AE in the bedroom :p

[PortlandMacUser]

Very cool setup.

Okay, so here's what I've decided to do. I've gotten a LaCie 160 GB D2 drive and Airport Express. Got a 4 GB iPod Mini to take music with me. I will do backups of music on DVD. Whole package should be here in a week from Apple. In all, I'll have to sell about $450 worth of CDs on eBay to pay for the setup, which shouldn't be too difficult.

Thanks for the advice, all. :)