Accessing iTunes Through External Hard Drive and Streaming Air Tunes

Hello, hoping someone can help me:

I have an iBook G4 with 60GB of hard drive space. I currently have the Airport Express to wirelessly stream iTunes through my stereo. And I love this setup.

Unfortunately I'm running out of hard drive space. My desire is to access iTunes through my iOmega 80GB external hard drive (it's a USB connection). And I'd like to do this wirelessly and still be able to stream music through my stereo using iTunes.

I feel as if I've read people are doing this successfully. And I know this may include purchasing Airport Extreme (in hoping that it can run simultaneously with Airport Express...why don't they just put the stereo jack in the Extreme?).

I was just at the famous NYC store Tekserve and they said this isn't possible.

Another option would be for Tekserve to give my iBook a hard drive upgrade. They quoted me approx. $160 for a 160GB hard drive in my iBook. Is this - especially if I were have to buy a $179 Airport Extreme - just the simple option?

Is this true? I feel as if I can solve this problem. Do I have options to use my iBook to run iTunes, accessing all of my music wirelessly on an external drive, and still stream this through Air Tunes on my stereo?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Todd

Well, you can share that drive through the airport extreme station

Apple - AirPort Extreme - Features - Hard Drive Sharing

Once you can mount that drive it is easy to put all your music on that shared network drive, just like any other attached drive

Keeping your iTunes collection on an external

The following assumes you want to keep all your iTunes music and movies on an external disk and ensure new music is always stored on the external drive, and that you want to share the iTunes library among multiple Users of your mac

First, you need to consolidate your iTunes Library to a folder you have chosen of the external drive.

Select the command consolidate library from the Advanced Menu. This will copy all your itunes media to the external folder and link the itunes library file to it

The files will now be on the external while the library.xml file (the index as it were) will still be in the Users > Me > Music folder of your mac.

If you want this file on the external as well as well, copy it to external iTunes folder, start itunes with the alt key pressed and you will have the option to select the library file now on the external



Select the library file you just copied and now both your music and the library are on the external

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply!

Will I still be able to stream music wirelessly through Airtunes using the Airport Express (while using the Extreme?).

The person I spoke with here at the NYC store said it may or may not work because of lag times with the wireless network. Though he couldn't quite explain this specifically, so I'm skeptical.

Basically, now that I know I can access the iTunes library wirelessly from an external hard drive, is anyone out there also streaming iTunes through a wireless external drive (using Airport Express)?

Also, are there any interface/navigation issues/quirks with accessing iTunes through an external drive?

Excuse my ignorance, but what would be the issue as to where your iTunes library pulls from? I have my entire library on an external HD to save space and as long as the hd is switched on, I have full access to everything.

I actually hope that this does work, as I'm looking to purchase the AirPort Express to run Airtunes.

Any additional feedback you could give would be great!