4 Imacs (Soon 5) and Itunes

[Bozola]

Currently I have ALL my music ripped on an external 200GB drive ~15GB. All of the other 3 imacs get their music from my Imac thru music sharing.

I am planning to buy a new Imac within the next week. Any strategies on how to manage my Itunes Library with 5 computers??

Should I use my old imac with the ext drive as a Itunes Server?

Should I copy all of the music to all of the Imacs with a master copy?
(Any software to do that quickly??)

Any other ideas?

Frederic

 

[Bozola]

Any one with a suggestion???

 

[After G]

How about putting your iTunes library on the external drive?

Then whenever you want to listen to it on another computer, you have the option of moving the external drive to that computer.

 

[crazzyeddie]

Whats wrong with the system you're currently using?

 

[homerjward]

what about putting it on the ext hooked up to one of the old imacs and turning on sharing on everything so that the music would be sort of distributed around, but still accessible everywhere? or is that what u were saying?

 

[Bozola]

here are the options that I see

1 use the old imac as a music server

2 use the new imac as a music server

3 use the old imac as a server and copy all songs between the server and the new imac.

All have pros and cons... I was wondering if anyone had this setup and how they were handling their music with multiple computers.



and

what about putting it on the ext hooked up to one of the old imacs and turning on sharing on everything so that the music would be sort of distributed around, but still accessible everywhere? or is that what u were saying?

 

[ReanimationLP]

Get a Firewire repeater. Plug the drive into the iMac, then plug the iMac into the repeater. Connect the rest of the iMacs to the repeater, hold down T on the imac with the drive, it should show up on the rest. This triggers it into Firewire Disk Mode. Or so I'm told. Good luck.

 

[.mp3]

The best thing to do is to turn one of your iMac into a musicserver. Then, you just share all the music over our internetconnection so each computer gets all you music.

 

[cgratti]

sell 4 iMacs and buy a sweet new Powermac dual processor machine, loaded, also buy an external hard drive with about 500+GB space and use that as a server.

Then send me all the extra cash you have left for giving you this idea.