My son’s iTune library has exceeded to capacity of our G5. At the same time he is frustrated that our Belkin router doesn’t seem to support his Wii internet wishes (in particular for Animal Crossing City Folk). I am considering getting the Time Capsule and having that solve both problems at once, but one review said that it does not work so well for holding and accessing the iTunes files. We are hardwired for 3 machines - two Apple and one Windows based - and also hardwired from one computer to the living room TV set.
Anyone with experience with the Time Capsule that would be pertinent? Thoughts? Thanks.
I have a Time Capsule and tried keeping my iTunes collection on it. Space wasn’t the issue, setting up iTunes was.
The default is for iTunes to keeps its library on the local drive, and you have to change the settings (iTunes Settings, Advanced) to make it store its library on a remote drive. It was way too easy to mistakenly adjust iTunes itself so that the default library location returned to the local drive, and then I ended up with songs on both drives. I recreated the library several times before I got everything arranged, and I eventually got a larger local hard drive in my laptop to accommodate all the music. It still gets backed up to my Time Capsule, though.
The Time Capsule has three LAN ports (gigabit Ethernet) plus a WAN port that accepts gigabit Ethernet from your modem. If you want to connect more devices, at least one of then will need to be wireless (WiFi, 802.11 a/b/g/n). I’d place the unit that uses the net least on the wireless connection. Can the Wii hook up via WiFi?
Depends on sound quality and length of song. My iTunes is 1596 songs and 19.03 GB. Part of that is that I have everything stored in CD quality (and won’t have it any other way, thanks.) and because my collection is almost entirely classical and jazz, the ‘songs’ (tracks would be a more accurate description) are over 10 minutes long, some of them almost a full hour.
The son of DSeid might just happen to be an audiophile. Hell, I was when I was 14…
I’m using a GDrive, and other than the chaos that ensues if I forget to turn it on before I open iTunes, it’s working out quite well.
I am considering the time capsule as well. I am running out of storage space, and I will need a wireless router soon. The major drawback for the TC is the cost: $300 for a 500 GB HD and a router… I could buy a NetGear router for $40 and get an external HD for $75. The back up capability isn’t a big concern, because I duplicate my files on both of my computers. If Apple updates the TC, lowers the price significantly, or adds some new features, I may buy one, but I can’t justify the cost right now.
ETA: I just realized I don’t need a router… I can go connect the desktop to the cable modem via Ethernet, and setup wifi via my airport card to connect my laptop. No time capsule for me!
I don’t use time capsule. I do use time machine to backup my media to an external drive and i also store my media on another external drive. Time machine is brilliant.
I’d think, and I’m a little too tipsy to research it, that you can get an external hard drive + a wireless router for less then Apple’s all in one solution. As a matter of fact, I bet you can get two external drives (one to use as a regular storage device and one to use for backups) and a knock around wireless router for the same price as a time capsule.
Generally I like Apple product and if you really weren’t very technical I could see spending the money for TC however, hard drive space (even external) is very cheap these days. I don’t see reason to pay Apple tax on this one. If you’re running Tiger the time machine software is included.
11,501 songs at 58 Gb but another 500 worth of movies and TV.
Yup. He’s gotten into buying TV shows (a year’s worth of a series at a time, seasons of Scrubs for example) from iTunes. Amazing how fast that uses up space.
Wii can use WiFi.
The iTunes set-up is the part that concerns me. I’d love it if the whole library could be accessed from the one hard drive anywhere in the house but I fear that I’d screw up the settings somehow.
I do this and it’s not nearly as complex as one would think. Let me tell you what I do and maybe this will help you think out a solution that will work for you.
I store all of my media in a central location on an external USB hard drive. This drive called ‘media’ is attached to a mac mini that’s hooked to the TV and it’s also hooked to the big stereo. To set iTunes to use the external drive rather then an internal drive, you go to iTunes, Preferences, Advanced and point the library location to the external drive.
I ran into the same problem as Sunspace with iTunes wanting to reset this setting but I solved this by doing the following. If iTunes starts up without the external drive mounted, it resets the library location back to the local drive. To ensure this doesn’t happen I created an alias for the iTunes application, put it on the external drive then dragged this alias to the dock replacing the iTunes icon. In this manner iTunes cannot be launched without the drive being mounted because if the drive isn’t mounted the icon is not there to click. (I actually learned this on a win box - substitute shortcut for alias and desktop icon for dock)
On this machine I have a second external hard drive called ‘backup’ and I use time machine to backup the media drive. Early on I lost 30 gB of music and had to re-rip a stack of CDs and so I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. With this approach, I’d have to have two external drive fail simultaneously to lose my media. Time machine is a set it and forget it thing so I have to say this is awesome because I don’t have to remember to backup, it just happens.
Back to the media drive. This drive is also a shared drive on my network. Within the iTunes library there is a folder called ‘new music’. ‘new music’ has an alias that sits on the root of the drive so if I add more media from another machine on the network, I copy it to ‘new music’ and from there I drag it into the main iTunes window. Doing this files it in the appropriate place in my main library (in accordance with the ‘keep my music folder organized’ setting) and removes it from ‘new music’. In this manner I can rip a CD on my laptop or shop the iTunes store and easily add new media to the main library by first dragging it to ‘new music’ then dragging it from there into the iTunes window.
Lastly, the other machine on my network is a laptop and it doesn’t have enough storage to hold all my media on it. Of course because it’s portable occasionally I’d like to take it and have media on it. So on this machine I keep a throwaway version of my media (which is typically all the music and a few movies) These I just copy from the shared drive onto the laptops local drive. I also have the option of adding media to this library by pointing to it directly on the shared media drive however once I’m off the network, these entries are not available. Of course when I’m on my network I can still access anything on the media drive via iTunes shared library feature.
Funny how you say something isn’t too complex then once you start writing it down, it sounds way more complex then it is.
Anyway with this approach, you’re free to get whatever router solution you need to solve your wii problem with as many ports as you need for your network and you get a redundant drive setup for storing your media and backing it up. So if you have a hard drive failure you won’t lose your data where if the time capsule were to fail and you were using it for media and backup you would lose your data. It’s also likely going to be less money to setup