Airport, External Hard Drives, and iTunes.

Ok, so....this is what I would like to do, maybe someone here can tell me if it is possible:

I have decided to get rid of all of my CDs and rip them into iTunes. We're talking about 1,100 CDs. I've ripped about 200 of them so far, and am up to 40GB on my MacBook. Sooner or later, I am going to run out of space, especially since I am keeping my TV shows and movies on a separate external drive to make room.

Is it possible to:

Get an Airport Base Station (and/or) Airport Express...
Hook up an external hard drive to the Airport...
Keep my iTunes music on a 1TB external hard drive...
Access it from my MacBook (and from my iMac when I get one).

Is this possible? If it isn't, does anyone have any better ideas on how to keep my music files on an external drive and be able to access them from my laptop and my desktop?

If the above isn't possible....it **** well should be. ;-) That would be very cool, especially as I keep ripping CDs...it would be nice to know they are going straight into the external hard drive (which I will then also backup to be safe).

Well even if it isn;t (I don;t know still makingmy way from windows) you could just get a MyBook 1 TB station about the size of a cynder block and just carry it from compute rot computer(better yet take the laptop to the HD and leave the HD near the iMac) to manually transfer stuff.

You can do this, but here is an even better idea. rip all the music to the external hard drive then have itunes point its music library to the external. BUT when you get the imac, have it point to the external hard drive, then share that library through itunes, this way you can be wireless on the macbook and still listen to all the songs through itunes without having to connect to the external hard drive.

hondagus87 said:

You can do this, but here is an even better idea. rip all the music to the external hard drive then have itunes point its music library to the external. BUT when you get the imac, have it point to the external hard drive, then share that library through itunes, this way you can be wireless on the macbook and still listen to all the songs through itunes without having to connect to the external hard drive.

Click to expand...

The only problem with that is that you have less control when you share a library through iTunes, don't you? Like....the one time I did it, it seemed to me that I could not sort by genre, since it looked like a giant playlist.

But wait....you're saying that what I've said above is possible? Am I able to connect an external hard drive through an Airport Base, and then I am able to access it via iTunes (or anything, really)?

I find iTunes' Bonjour sharing extremely convenient. When I bought my iMac, I didn't bother moving all my music from the PC, I just connected wirelessly and was able to access all the music without any configuration....

But I guess the airport extreme thing will work as well, albeit, at a higher cost...

The Tsar said:

The only problem with that is that you have less control when you share a library through iTunes, don't you? Like...the one time I did it, it seemed to me that I could not sort by genre, since it looked like a giant playlist.

But wait...your saying that what I've said above is possible? Am I able to connect an external hard drive through an Airport Base, and then I am able to access it via iTunes (or anything, really)?

Click to expand...

Yes you can. You will need the airport express and the airport extreme. The express will allow you to stream itunes. The extreme will allow you to share a hard drive. You will need both. As the express has air tunes built in and the extreme doesn't. And the extreme is the only one that will allow you to share a HD on a network.
You will be able to read and write to the HD wirelessly from any computer in the house. Connect the express to a stereo receiver and you can stream Itunes from any computer in the house. All you will need to do is change the settings in itunes pref. to read from the external dive and your set. It's really easy to set up and it works great. You just have to spend a little dough. And format your External HD as FAT 32, so windows pc's can read and write to your drive.

I figure I'll post here before starting my own thread. because this is the closest thing I can find in the search.

goes like this

1. I have a Macbook Pro.
2. I have a HDD conected to a new Airport Extreme Base station
3. I want to move all pics / music to the external HDD and then delete the files off the MBP HDD
4. Then, I want to be able to read/write to and from the HDD.

This is different since I only have 1 computer. Do I need the Airport Express for iTunes or will I be able to read the files from the External HDD.

Thanks!

i have a mbp - i have the extreme base station with a external hdd. You can do what you want as my itunes library is on my hdd.

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/19/how-to-keep-your-itunes-library-on-an-external-hard-drive/

hope that helps or this

http://playlistmag.com/features/2005/08/shiftitunes/index.php

awesome! thanks a bunch

Who listens to 1100 CDs!

theonegod said:

Who listens to 1100 CDs!

Click to expand...

Orchestra conductors.

quickly-
these articles seem like they were written as if you have the externall HDD connected directly via USB/Firewire. I want to connect the HDD to the APE via USB and then connect wirelessly. will this still work?

the articles were posted to ensure you moved your library in the correct way and understood how to point itunes to the revised location of your music.

personally, I had to format my external hd whilst it was directly connected to my mbp and then used "airport disk utility" to set up the external hd wirelessly when it was attached into the usb port of the extreme base station. Once this was done - the hd just appears in finder as a 2nd drive - like it would do if it was attached.

It works wireless - no problems whatsoever. Have a search on here or google for "itunes music on external hd" - I am sure you will find your answer if you are still unsure.

It would have been nice if the Airport extreme had one usb2.0 and on firewire800. Would have made things easy.

would have been even nicer if they had built a big fat hard drive onto the apple tv which will centrally store your media but they didn't and probably will not.

I guess thought should be given to the mac mini in this instance as an alternate solution?

Not to hijack this thread, but I'm also very interested in some sort of consolidated storage option once I get an iMac. Right now, I have a LinkSys Wireless G Broadband Router which allows wired (4) and wireless. Plus I have a LinkSys Switch & a LinkSys wired print server.

To me the best solution would be some sort of 500GB or 1.00TB network drive that is accessible from the iMac, my PCs, my ThinkPad notebook, and... my Dell Axim 51v PDA. I do have a ton of image & media files, and currently use two external USB drives, plus my main PC has two SATA internal drives that are filling up as well.