New Airport Extreme (network disk)

with it's network drive capability, does anyone know if you could set up your iTunes directory on the network drive so all Macs in the house use one common directory?

I'm not sure but I'm interested in knowing the answer to this as well.

I have never tried this but I'd think that all you would have to do is move your iTunes library to the external HD. Then, on each computer of the network, change the default location ("iTunes Music folder location") in preferences. (Make sure the new location is to your external hard drive.) However, this is assuming there is only one iTunes directory, not multiple ones. If each computer has a different Library, I imagine you would have to merge them all.

That would work fine. You will also need to put the iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library database file on the hard drive and set aliases to each of them in their original location on each of the computers. Without this changes made to the library and play counts would not update automatically

Plus, wouldn't you have to make sure only computer has with the preference setting 'keep itunes folder orgranized'?

trpnmonkey41 said:

That would work fine. You will also need to put the iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library database file on the hard drive and set aliases to each of them in their original location on each of the computers. Without this changes made to the library and play counts would not update automatically

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I like that idea, trpnmonkey. Is it possible to put the library and library database file on the external networked drive? But won't iTunes create new ones in your Home Folder on your internal drive as well?

You put the library and database files on the external drive. Then you create aliases of those files and put a copy of the alias on each of the machines that are going to access the files. Once the aliases are on the computers you can rename them so they don't say alias, and when you open iTunes it will look at the aliased files in your home folder and access the actual file on the network drive.

trpnmonkey41 said:

You put the library and database files on the external drive. Then you create aliases of those files and put a copy of the alias on each of the machines that are going to access the files. Once the aliases are on the computers you can rename them so they don't say alias, and when you open iTunes it will look at the aliased files in your home folder and access the actual file on the network drive.

Click to expand...

Thanks! WHere do you put them? Where they would be put automically by iTunes itself? Also, I've been doing a version of this myself using not this new airport extreme, but the version just prior. I've been using an old G4 titanium to serve up the music to the network, so all computers can access the music as shared music. I then used a third party program called Sharepoints so that I can load the disk itself onto another powerbook (mine) to manage the music over the network. the problem here is that this makes iTunes on my mac run VERY slowly (the itunes folder on the shared disk is very large, almost 500 gig)

Would this new solution with the new airport and the shared disk work better? Would it still be slow?

thanks!

You can put the Database and Library file anywhere you want on the external. Put the aliases exactly where original Library and database file were located

As for speed, how was the G4 titanium connecting to all of the other computers? Your best speeds would be if everything was N and in a decent range of the router

trpnmonkey41 said:

You can put the Database and Library file anywhere you want on the external. Put the aliases exactly where original Library and database file were located

As for speed, how was the G4 titanium connecting to all of the other computers? Your best speeds would be if everything was N and in a decent range of the router

Click to expand...

The hard disk is connected The G4 titanium by firewire, which is connected by ethernet to the airport. The airport runs the network, with 4 or 5 expresses in various rooms in the house, connected to stereos and/or printers. Only one of our laptops is a new core duo, the other three are g4s, none more than a year old though. the expresses and the older powerbooks will slow this all down, even with the new airport, right?