Having trouble setting up a network

welp, yer half way there. Do you have Personal File Sharing on? It's located in your System Preferences' Sharing option. Make sure you have it turned on on both Macs. when you turn it on you'll get a message on the bottom of the window to type in an address in the Connect to Server window.

 

I have a network with 8 macs, and I use airport extreme, it works perfectly to share files, music and bonjour messaging. All you have to do is:

Go to system preferences, sharing, and check personal file sharing and if you want, remote login. Do this on both macs.

Then, to access each computers HD, or cd/dvd or any other external flash drive or ipod etc, click on go in the finder menu, and say connect to server, or just press the apple key (next to the spacebar) and k, and type in the ip address of the mac you want to access.

 

Have you enabled music sharing in the iTunes preferences on both Macs?

 

And do you have iTunes running on the mac to be shared? It won't work unless it is.

Also, your personal firewall on the Mac might be blocking iTunes, but it should tell you what to do if it is.

 

I had a problem similar to this. I fixed it by giving the airport express a manual IP adress (not DHCP), and then disabling "Distribute IP-Adresses" (on the airport express).

 

On the iMac, open up Aiport Admin Utility.
Select your network, and push "configure".
(Select "Internet", and in "Configure", select "Manually"
Type in your IP adress, your routers IP address, subnet mask, and router address.) <-- Don't know if this part is necessary.
Select "Network", uncheck "Distribute IP addresses".
Update.

Mind you, I'm not really knowledgeable on this, I just had pretty much the exact same problem, and this is how I fixed it.

Good luck!