Airport: Arg!!!

[Soundhound]

I just set up a whole Airport network for streaming music at home. And now Apple comes out with the base station I should really have for this. Very frustrating. Anyway, here's my sad story. Anyone have a better way to do this????????? Thanks!!!

I'm very new to this, but for streaming music for the most part the speed of the network now seems ok. The problem I'm having is that I think I'm setting things up in an unorthodox way, and Apple stuff doesn't take kindly to that:

I have an older Powerbook (2001 titanium g4, 400mhz) connected to an Airport extreme. It has a 500 gig lacie hard drive connected to it which is full of music. It serves up music to the wireless network which includes 4 airport expresses connected to stereos in different rooms, and is accessed wirelessly by several powerbooks.

The music streaming works ok. Not perfect, there are occassional dropouts, but on the whole it's very good. The problem is that I use my powerbook to manage the itunes music library on the hard drive, not the powerbook which is connected to the hard drive by firewire and is serving it up. I do this by mounting the hd on my powerbook through a piece of software called Sharepoints (I think). But this has problems - for example syncing my ipod takes a really long time because it's pulling files over the wireless network. Last night I just connected my powerbook directly to the hd and synced my ipod that way.

there's gotta be a better way. I'm wondering if the new airport exteme that was just announced will be it.

 

[jsw]

Unless you have anything that can handle 802.11n, you're probably just fine without the new AirPort. The one big plus to it, for your use, is that it can serve your drives up if you connect them via its USB interface, meaning that it could replace your older PB as a disk server.

Still, syncing wirelessly, esp. without 802.11n, will be slow.

 

[Cybix]

there's gotta be a better way. I'm wondering if the new airport exteme that was just announced will be it.

yes.

I run two airport express.. one in office, one in garage (at the moment) both connected to stereo's. one in office has ethernet to my router....

If I'm in the office, I can stream music to the office, but the garage wont do it (too far away from that base station)

If I'm in the middle of the house, roughly, both stream fine.

I've got them setup with WDS.. which is working really well. I bought the Garage airport so i could get wireless coverage in the front area of my house (couldnt before)..

range on the express is less than impressive, I heard if you position the unit a certain way it's range increases... possibly.

you need the new airport extreme, so you can serve up your ext hard disk straight on the airport.

of course, you'd want good range!

 

[Letters]

Soundhound , could you give more info on how you set up your network.

I want to do the same thing, have all my music on one computer and be able to edit and delete songs from any of the computers connected to my network

 

[Soundhound]

Soundhound , could you give more info on how you set up your network.

I want to do the same thing, have all my music on one computer and be able to edit and delete songs from any of the computers connected to my network

Well I woulnd't look to me as a way to learn any of this! (or anything else for that matter ) I'm sure I'm not doing it the best way, and I'm experiencing a lot of problems. But for better or worse, here's how I'm set up.

I have a lacie 500 gig hard drive connected via 400 firewire to a 2001 400mhz Titanium Powerbook. That serves up the music to the network. I've had this connecting to the network wirelessly, but I may connected it via ethernet, because this may be one of the main bottlenecks I'm experiencing.

The base station that is connected to internet via cable modem is a. new (last fall) airport. The rest of the network is comprised of 4 airport expresses, each of which is connected to a stereo in a different room (living room, study, bedroom, kitchen). A couple of thesse are also connected to printers.

The music is accessed by the several powerbooks in the house. None of whihc is more than a year old. One of which is a new core duo pokwerbook. The Titanium mac share the itunes music, and the library shows up on the other pwoerbooks itunes as a shared library. Streaming works fine for the mmost part. But there are occassional dropouts, and if I send music to several rooms at once the dropouts become more frequent. Not always, but sometimes.

The problem I run into is that I need my powerbook, which I use in my study, to be the one that runs the library of music on the lacie hd. The only way I've been able to do this is with a program called Sharepoints - I use it on the titanium powerbook, and it allows my powerbook to mount the lacie hard drive. The problem with this is speed. When I mount the lacie hard drive through the wireless network, operation is VERY pokey. And syncing my ipod cna take an hour or more.

Well that's about it. I'm hoping that two things are going to help. 1) reconnecting the server powerbook by cable rather than wirelessly and 2) getting the new airport extreme when it comes out. This will hopefully be faster to some degree, and would let me mount the lacie hd directly to the network without the neeed for the server powerbook.

Whew. All I wanted to do was listen to music.