iTunes with Time Capsule?

[badlandz]

I'm just curious, does all this fancy new Mac stuff really work together seamlessly?

Say my household goes all Mac. Two MacBookAir laptops, two 160G iPods, and a 500G Time Capsule.

Clearly, the 160G iPods have more room for music storage than the 64G or 80G drive on the MacBookAir, so the 500G Time Capsule has to be used for storage of all the mp3's it will take to fill the 160G iPods.

All backup, long term storage, and mp3's will have to be on the Time Capsule, which seems like no big deal at first... But?

Can iTunes work well using this wireless network drive instead of an internal drive? I thought that answer was no.

And, if that answer is yes, can we have a single "family" CD library of all our CDs in our household on the Time Capsule, with access from any Mac in our house? Or would we have to actually have make two separate copies of the same song and use twice the disk space, so each person could use it? How would iTunes handle play counts, as a group or for which Mac your accessing from?

 

[jphastings]

iTunes on Network drives

You can use a network drive as a place to store your iTunes music (I do it at the moment) however there are some things that are a bit annoying.

What you would do:
1) Use Time Capsule as a networked storage device and simply make a folder for all your music (organise it how you want, iTunes won't be able to organise it for you) - I don't own a Time Capsule, but I've gathered it can work as a network share.
2) Make sure the 'copy to iTunes' option is *off* on your computers.
3) Drag/drop the main music folder from the network share into iTunes
- iTunes now scans your folder and adds every file to it's database.
- The *database* holds playcounts/ratings etc, so they're personal to your iTunes.
4) Do this on each computer and you're away!


Problems:
If you take your computer away from your house and try and play music (or the capsule is off for a moment) when iTunes tries to play any track it'll skip through hundreds of songs marking them as 'cannot be found' - they'll stay this way until you play them manually (ie, it won't shuffle to them). So that can be a real pain.
- Possible solution: Store the entire iTunes DB on the network drive, but I think each iTunes library is signed for the computer it's played on, so this might not work. (not tried it, at least)
If you add new music to your iTunes library you'll need to put it on the network share first, then add it on each computer manually. Royal pain.

Cool things:
You might think that if you boot up your computer and hit 'play' it'll immediately start skipping though files saying they're not there. But no! iTunes/Leopard notices that it references a 'volume' that isn't there and attempts to mount it, if you're in range of your capsule, it'll take a few seconds extra, but it'll just start playing. Cool. Now if only your personal wireless went all over the world...

iTunes doesn't care about the size of your harddisk, only the size of the library so you'll easily be able to keep enough stuff for your iPods to work well.

Hope that helps! (More importantly, I hope Apple sorts out a decent central-network media storage device. It'll make all our lives easier! I know it'll have to be a new product, expensive, undersized - for my collection at least - and ultimately lacking in features I'll have to hack onto it, but we can't have version 2 until number 1 comes out.)

Good luck!

 

[lowpass]

thanks! that worked perfectly for my macs. now if i can just get my PC to see the time capsule...