[garyi]

I got a SONOS NAS by SmartDisk. I thought I would be clever and get the one the apple store was selling to be sure it was compatible.

Sure enough it is kind of compatible. It loads up all right when I click to it, but sadly the main purpose for me was for an iTunes library to be accessed from two macs.

This is turning into a nightmare.

firstly my iMac started showing random songs that were not available. even though they were there in the library.

The iMac was so slow with iTunes 7 that I had to give up and in the end reinstall iTunes 6. This works OK.

But I have to manually connect to the NAS each time. If the mac is put to sleep it normally loses the connection. If I forget to manually mount the NAS and load iTunes it can't find the library so resets to local folder, a complete pain!

Another big issue is if I load some new music on my iMac this obviously does not show up on the iBook. and Visa Versa. Continually dragging the music folder from the nas onto each itunes is painfully slow as to be a non goer.

So I had a great plan. I would put the whole itunes folder on the NAS and create aliases for it both macs, what a solution.

Sadly no. the iMac works OK. The iBook nearly explodes with constant complaints of server interruptions and 60% when loading tells me the volume with the music library on may be locked or I do not have write permissions (Both incorrect)

When all is said and done, all I want to achieve is what I think should be quite simple. To be able to access my itunes library from two macs (And later be able to stream to the up and coming iTV or a airport wireless) I did not want to have both macs running to achieve this.

NAS seemed the solution. Macs just work right?

What do I need to do then?

I have:

iMac intel 20 inch.
Smartdisk NAS
iBook 14inch
10,000+ tunes mostly in AAC format.

Any help appreciated.

[]

iTunes is created mainly for the iPod, not anything else. Apple has rudimentary support for other MP3 players at best. Did it come with its own jukebox for loading songs on it for Mac? You should try that if it did. OS X itself has had other MP3 player support since OS 8.6, but iTunes hasn't really until iTunes 4. I am suprised that iTunes 7 even found it, since iTunes 7 doesn't even work with the SLVR right now.

[slugslugslug]

The OP didn't say anything about using another portable audio player. A NAS is a hard drive designed to be accessible over the network by multiple computers. Didn't you claim you work for Apple?

[garyi]

a NAS is a network harddrive I only intend to use the music folder with iTunes.

[himself]

You don't need to use aliases, it will only screw things up with multiple machines connecting to the same directory that way. First, make sure that for each machine connected to the NAS, the iTunes preferences has the NAS specified as the iTunes Music folder location (Advanced > General tabs in the prefs). Once that is set, all you have to do to get any music off of your Macs and onto the NAS (anytime you need to) is to go to the Advanced menu and select "Consolidate Library…" and any music you have that isn't on the NAS will be copied there. It may also help to delete any music you have on your Macs local hard drives to prevent iTunes from getting confused, but this isn't really necessary.

This probably won't help with the NAS disconnecting and having to manually reconnect to it all of the time. You may have to fiddle with some of your NAS and or network settings to prevent it from disconnecting when you put a machine to sleep.

[El Gato]

Originally Posted by himself

This probably won't help with the NAS disconnecting and having to manually reconnect to it all of the time. You may have to fiddle with some of your NAS and or network settings to prevent it from disconnecting when you put a machine to sleep.

... or write a script to connect to the drive whenever your machine wakes up.