Home Network Solution

[mattrsa]

Hi Guys

Just about to move to a new place I'm trying to think of the best way to network it with what existing equiptment I have.

So I will be getting virgin cable installed as my ISP which comes with wireless router altho not sure which one.

What I basically want to have is a home network with a central storage point for all my music and movies/tv.

I currently have the time capsule for backing up my macbook, I lead to believe that this cannot be used to store my music collection which I wanted streamed to other laptop on the same network.

I also have a WD My Book NAS(networked attached storage) drive as well as various other external usb hard drives.

I have also just looked at the apple air port express base station which I may puchase.

So with all this hardware in mind how would I go about setting up my network effectively so that I can keep everything(music/tv/movies) centrally and be able to access through laptops which I plan to have around the house

Thanks
Matt

 

[Fizzoid]

If the NAS My Book is plugged in to your wireless router via the ethernet port (I'm presuming it has ethernet ports, as most do) then you should be able to access it anywhere on your network, so use that as your central storage point.

 

[mattrsa]

Ok but can I used that drive as the location for my iTunes library and if I bought and airport express could I stream music to it from the My Book?

 

[capps]

Ok but can I used that drive as the location for my iTunes library and if I bought and airport express could I stream music to it from the My Book?

Yes. You'll just tell iTunes or whatever program you use for music to look to that drive for your music and video files. I assume you know how to map drives in Windows and OS X, that is all you'll have to do.

 

[waw74]

One thing to be aware of (at least on a mac), if you change the location of your music library from the default of "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music" (~ is your home folder) to a network drive, and then try to play music with out that drive connected. iTunes will change the music folder back to the default, and then try to find all the music there, it gets really unhappy. It then changes where it thinks music should be, and it's downhill from there.

the easy way i discovered to keep this from happening is to make an alias to the network location where your music is, in the place of the normal "iTunes Music" folder. you either need to make sure this mounts on boot, or just open it before you try to play music. If you don't you'll get a music not found. If you catch it soon enough, just connect to the remote drive, and try to play the song again, and you'll be fine