Question About NAS / iTunes

[Heart Break Kid]

Hello MR folks,

I had a quick question prior to purchasing a NAS. At this moment, I'm running out of space on my external drive dedicated to music. At this point I feel that it is time to upgrade from an external to a NAS. I was looking at the Buffalo Linkstation Pro (320 GB as it will probably be more than I will need for the immediate future).

My question is this; can I use a NAS as an iTunes server? Ideally, I'd like to have it set up so that all my music and photos are stored on the NAS. So when I rip a new CD / load up a bunch of new photos, rather than storing it locally / to my external...they are added directly to the NAS.

Is that possible?

I'd like it so that its not just my computer that is set up to interact with the NAS this way. I'd also like to be able to have my desktop in the den be able to add music to the NAS and have it show up on all the computers on my network.

So an example would be. I load up iTunes and have 0 songs. I rip a cd, and all the files are stored in the iTunes folder on the NAS. When I launch up a different computer, those songs are seen in the iTunes library of that computer, and when the second computer rips a CD and adds it to the NAS, the new tracks all display on the first computer.

Confusing, I know. I wish I could explain it more clearly.


Extra Credit:
It would also be really sweet if future periphreals (Read iTV) that I purchase can access content on the NAS.

 

[quackattack]

I am going to bump this because I have the same question. Can anyone help? Maybe the original poster can share his solution?

Further more, I want to set up an NAS but I am using a APE as my only router. There are 3 computers in my house sharing this connection. What will I need to buy to attach an NAS and still be able to use my APE for wireless? The obvious problem being that there is only one Ethernet port on the APE.

I do have an old B router lying around, but I would really like to use the G speed of my APE. Sorry if this seems obvious, I am fairly new to networking. Thanks for your help!

 

[Transeau]

To do what you want to is a pricey, but it works great.

I have an Infrant ReadyNAS/NV. It's (in my opinion) the best NAS on the market. Fully supports iTunes serving. It can be accessed via AFP, SMB, NFS, FTP, HTTP, WebDAV and RTSP. It's also upgradeable and under active development, so it should do nicely in the future.

http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS NV

 

[Sesshi]

I've started playing with the Twonkyvision (whatta name) media server on the QNAP TS-101. The NAS is slow (or as slow as most low-to-mid-priced NASs) but the shared library thing (not being able to see changes from one machine to another) is getting to me a bit and the new silent server isn't working out too well, so it's going back to be slightly reengineered and all my music is back on the QNAPs again.

Twonky may be the answer but I've only just started fiddling with it. If it can act as the media server, then with the iTunes plugins I should be able to get all the machines running iTunes to see the same thing.

I'll get back to you if it works well or not.