New to mac computers and peripherals

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I recently purchased my first mac, Mid 2012 13" MacBook Pro, in late September and fell in love with it. Since then I have added and Apple TV and now an Airport Extreme to my home network and am curious about a few things:

I have two external Seagate Hard drives, one 500GB and one 1TB that I plan on hooking up to my Airport extreme base station, the 1TB I am going to use for backup and the 500GB I plan on using to store my itunes library. My question is this:

What is the best way to store my itunes media (movies, music, books, ect) and have it accessible from my laptop Apple TV and Ipod touch?

I have seen posts which recommend storing the libraries on the external and I have seen ones which recommend installing Itunes on the external. Is one of these methods better than the other, given what I hope to accomplish? Also, when I do move my library to the external drive am I going to have to wait for the movies/songs to download to the laptop or Apple TV before playing or will all the media remain on the external?

Thanks in advance for any tips/advice
 
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I have an external USB connected to a Time Capsule - and back up to it. (Long story but the USB drive is an old Time Capsule drive. I rescued the drive but the old Time Capsule power supply died.) I also have a friend that I have setup to backup to an Airport Extreme - and an external La Cie Raid drive. That is also working fine - but she is only backing up one machine.
Bugs & Fixes: Time Machine, AirPort Extreme drives, and multiple Macs | Macworld

So although I've had good luck getting the USB drives to work as external backup - it seems that it isn't 100%. Also the drives have to be formatted hfs+ for this to all work.

I cannot store my iTunes or iPhoto library on my internal drive - as I have an 11" MBA with 256GB internal storage. I keep both libraries on a thunderbolt drive and it works fine. The only problem is - you have to have your drive attached to get your media. If you forget to attach the drive - just exit iPhoto or iTunes - plug in the drive - then restart - everything comes back fine.

On one PC - I even put my library on my time machine drive - and that worked fine as well. Just depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Personally - I would follow KISS (Keep it Simple Silly) - and hook one external drive to your iMac - keep your libraries and backup on that for the iMac. You should have no problems sending the media to an Apple TV. This is my current setup and it is working great. I have an MBP with an external drive - that I use to store my libraries. It is only USB 2.0 - and I can stream to any of my Apple TVs - and it looks fine. (I have 1 1080p Apple TV but most of my media is DVD quality)
 
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Thanks for the reply Ivan,

That scenario was kind of the one I was looking to avoid if possible. If I had an IMac that would be the way I would definitely go, unfortunately I only have a MacBook Pro for the time being and sort of envision a day when I'm getting some work done in bed on my MacBook and wanting to watch a movie on my Apple TV. I'd hate to have to keep my external HD tethered to my MacBook at all times and was hoping for a way to keep it tethered instead to the Airport.

If that makes any sense, thats what I'm trying to accomplish.
 

Slydude

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I have my iTunes library on a Time Capsule. Until recently if I launched iTunes before clicking on the Time capsule I would get the dreaded ! that meant iTunes could not find the media. PITA though less so now that they have improved this somewhat.

Doing either of the following should fix the issue of the drive not being mounted when you launch iTunes. They accomplish the same thing just slightly differently. Have not used these methods in a while but they should still work. Do either of the following:

1. With the drive connected to Airport mount the drive once (double click it so that it appears on the desktop). When it appears open the Users and Groups preference pane and add it to your login items. It will now mount anytime you log into the account and be ready for iTunes.

2. It should be possible to create an Automator workflow that mounts the drive before iTunes launches and then launches iTunes. I'll see if I can dig that up and test it.

If you use iTunes a lot the first method is probably preferable. The drawback is that it mounts the drive every time you log into that account.
 
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Thanks alot Sly,

I'll give it a shot when I get out of class tomorrow. I'll post back and let you know how it works.
 

Slydude

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No problem. If you cannot get the Automator workflow going and would like to do it that way give me a shout.

Edit: Fond the Steps to the Automator Workflow. It is really simple. It contains the plowing steps:

1. Get specified servers. Expand this step and add the path to your iTunes volume. If it is mounted when building the workflow simply drag it into the window for this step.
2. Connect to Server
3. Use Launch action and set it to iTunes.

Save the workflow as an application and use this to launch iTunes rather than the usual iTunes alias in the Dock.
 

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