iTunes on 2 Macs

Hi

I am looking at buying a MBP and maybe getting a Mac Mini (looking at switching from being a Windows user). I have 1 iPod (currently connecting to a copy of iTunes on Windows but that doesn't really matter).

I want a Mac Mini to store all my albums, podcasts and videos and interact with my iPod. But I also want to charge my iPod through my MBP when I am on the move and listen to my tracks and play my videos through my MBP's iTunes when I am conneted to home network (reason being that my Mac Mini will also be used by my brother for music and video editing when he visits).

I have 200+ albums and I don't really want to spend a week copying them over both the mini and MBP. I also don't want to have to unistall iTunes from my MBP.

If it helps my Mac Mini should be on all day at home and connected to my router.

Is all this possible?

On a side note does anyone know if you can copy music to your iTunes at CD quality (i.e. uncompressed) and would a 30GB video iPod hold that many albums?

Yep. That's exactly what I do. It's pretty self-explanatory once you get a Mac.

You can import songs in AIFF format with iTunes, it compresses them slightly, but you're not going to be able to tell a difference. 200 CDs in AIFF will not fit on a 30GB iPod, though. An entire CD (10-15 songs) at AIFF quality will be around 500-600MB. (500MBx200 CDs = 100000MB/1000MB=100GB)

I'd recommend importing them with the AAC encoder, you'll have great quality, but be able to fit all of them on the iPod.

Yes and no. OS X comes with iTunes installed and it is also part of the core components. Therefore you got to have it in both mini and mbp.

When you have your music on a Mac/PC you can easily share it with any other Mac/PC on your home network.

To share,

Open iTunes
Go to Preferences
Do the necessary changes in Share tab.

When you open iTunes in any other Mac/PC in your home network you should now see the shared music folder(s).

Thanks for your help guys.

I use AAC compression now and all my albums fit onto my 30GB and quality is still very good, I was just thinking that I could maybe wire my Mac Mini into my AV amp and just use that instead of my CD player but that’s no biggy.

The only other question is will my iPod have to be authorized between both my Mac Mini and MBP?

I just really want my iPod to work with iTunes on my Mac Mini as my MBP won't have anything on my iTunes on my MBP. I am sort of worried because I remember formatting my Windows XP machine and then plugging my iPod into my PC, iTunes loaded up said something about authorizing and then went and cleared my iPod. I really don't want to do that all the time.