Sharing itunes library within house

buyitall

Hi all,
My son has his own laptop and we have enabled the 'sharing' facility on itunes so that he can access my itunes library on my laptop. However, he can only access the music while my laptop is on, which is obviously not always ideal.
If I copy the whole library onto his laptop, I feel that we will forever be playing catch-up trying to keep both laptops uptodate with the same music.
So, I would like to create a separate source for music, which can be accessed by any laptop in the house. Am I right in thinking that I would have to attach some storage device to the router in order to be able to do this? I have an exernal hard drive with plenty of space on, but this has a usb connection, which the router doesn't have. Do I need to buy something called a NAS? If so, how much would this cost? I'm confused!
At the moment we have a cable modem, a router, 2 laptops, a printer and an old pc which all operate wirelessly, but I'm not sure if that means we have a network!!
Thanks in advance, all advice gratefully received xx

gaming_guy

what about putting the itunes library on the old pc and using that as the itunes streaming server?

Marty_J

There are probably cheaper ways, but an Apple AirPort Extreme makes sharing a hard drive (and a printer) very easy.

buyitall

gaming_guy wrote: »

what about putting the itunes library on the old pc and using that as the itunes streaming server?

Would that mean that the pc would have to be switched on? It takes forever to boot up! Sorry if that's a stupid question!

-TangleFoot-

A Belkin Network USB Hub would probably do, but since you have a spare PC lying around you could put something like FreeNAS on it. Provided none of the stuff in iTunes is 'protected' with DRM, you could just copy everything to the old PC and leave it there.

It'll probably boot quicker too...

buyitall

Marty_J wrote: »

There are probably cheaper ways, but an Apple AirPort Extreme makes sharing a hard drive (and a printer) very easy.

Thanks for the link Marty. What about the Airport Express - would that work?
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB321B/A/AirPort-Express-AirTunes?fnode=MTY1NDA0Mg&mco=NDE4MzkyOA

odowdchr

You can use a decent NAS server with an iTunes server built in....it's just a tick to enable then you can watch video and listen to music from anywhere...even on holiday if you want to connect over the web.
Many other features though, so perhaps overkill....though once you get one you'll use it for everything....website, storage, printing, backups, blogs, networking, downloading etc..

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS109j/index.php

buyitall

odowdchr wrote: »

You can use a decent NAS server with an iTunes server built in....it's just a tick to enable then you can watch video and listen to music from anywhere...even on holiday if you want to connect over the web.
Many other features though, so perhaps overkill....though once you get one you'll use it for everything....website, storage, printing, backups, blogs, networking, downloading etc..

http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS109j/index.php

Thank you. I have plenty of food for thought. Looks like it will be £100+ though, so I will have to decide just how important it is that we can all access all of the music all of the time!

kazd

I am really interested in this, we have the library on the main pc, kids were able to access it from their own pc's to play music but unable to update their playlist and ipods etc. This all has to be done on the main computer. I read that you can use you ipod as a hard drive, say for eg your pc died and you wanted to put the music on a new computer but just haven't been able to work out how we can all update our ipods from are own computers etc using the same library.

-TangleFoot-

kazd wrote: »

I am really interested in this

Might doubleTwist do the trick?

Marty_J

buyitall wrote: »

Thanks for the link Marty. What about the Airport Express - would that work?
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB321B/A/AirPort-Express-AirTunes?fnode=MTY1NDA0Mg&mco=NDE4MzkyOA

As far as I know, it doesn't do hard drive sharing, just printers. You can plug it into your stereo and stream your iTunes library through it though.