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Originally Posted by kcrossley
That's pretty interesting. How would you set something like that up? Is it an iTunes collection?
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I've got about 40gb of .mp3s, mostly ripped from my own (and friends) CDs. I copied it all over to the Snap last night. It was all ripped using the Lame Encoder with CDex as the GUI front end.
My goal is to free up disk space on my various computers. Currently I have three copies of the music collection, because I am paranoid about losing it all. This means that every time I rip some new CDs, I have to copy the files out to the various computers to keep it all backed up. So I set up the Snap as Raid 1 to provide better data protection, and will maintain one other backup copy on an external hard drive (and I should probably burn it all to DVD-ROM too). Once I am confident that the Snap is reliably set up, I will be able to delete about 40gb each from my home machine and from my notebook.
I have recently started using iTunes because I love the interface. iTunes is a little sluggish over a wireless g connection, but not too bad. It is quite responsive over the 100mb/s LAN. iTunes maintains the music library as a XML database on the local machine. So I thought that once it had built the local database, that searching, sorting, etc. would be just as fast as a local collection. This turns out not to be true because iTunes appears to verify the actual existence of each file as it displays the tracks in its interface. If the network share isn't available, it flags the tracks as unavailable, but fortunately does not delete the database entry.
When I added the tracks to the library by browsing to the network share, I found that iTunes was unacceptably slow using wireless. If I mapped a drive to the network share, and added the tracks by browsing to the drive letter, iTunes seems to be much quicker, and is actually quite usable over a wireless g connection. I've only just started to play with this, so these conclusions are preliminary.
A third party program called "iTunes Library Updater" can update the library when tracks are added to any path you specify. Therefore, I should be able to maintain the files on the Snap (other users will have read-only access to the files), and then update the libraries on each client machine semi-automatically. I've also thought about setting the "my music" location to be on the mapped drive, and then map "M:" on all the computers to the music share. This way, the Library files would be on the Snap. All users would share the same library, and all playlists would be available to everyone. This would probably be very slow, but I plan on trying it.
I don't have an iPod (yet), so I don't know if syncing an iPod will be unreasonaby slow from the network share.