Feb 05
Purchased music from iTunes
on more then one Mac (up to 5)
Sharing music on
one computer
the home and office computer
more then one computer in the same house hold
Airport Express
Squeeze Box
Turning on Sharing in iTunes.
doesn’t sync music just allows you to play it.
Syncing iPods.
http://www.fadingred.org/senuti/
itunes spelled backwards
iPod Extractor
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12739
floola
http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/
an extensive list of other tools
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_Managers
Conversation about drm’d AAC files
Consolidation (thoughts)
use the old Mac to store all the music.
set up VNC screen sharing
or load Leopard on it to screen share to it.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Cool! Just what i ordered, i needed to learn about this.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
John,
Can you share how you set up wordPress to post the podcast feed
What plugin do you use?
And
also can you tell me how you set up Airport Express to a stereo?
Thanks for any help
Jim
February 5th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
The podcast feed is built with PodCast Maker. It’s the easiest way to prep a feed. WordPress is leveled up to play podcasts with PodPress.
Connecting an Airport Express is really easy to connect to a stereo. There’s a 1/8″ plug on it where you can plug a Mini to RCA cable. Plug the RCA cables to the stereo.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
John,
Sorry I was getting the AirPort Extreme mixed up with Airport Express now I get it..
Thanks for the info….
Jim
February 5th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Airport Express should really be renamed to Airport Tunes for clarity.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
what do you think of the roku soundbridge as compared to the squeezebox?
February 5th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
You can stream your itunes media to your xbox 360 with “Connect 360″ from Nullriver. http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/connect360. Works great!
February 5th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
A few corrections…
First off, the Presidents Of The United States Of America don’t play six string instruments. They play a guitbass and a basitar, using three and two strings, respectively. (Check Wikipedia for the full details - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidents_of_the_United_States_of_America_%28band%29#Instruments)
Now, on to the more important stuff. The consolidation command has been in iTunes for years. My first exposure to it was helping a friend on a PC move everything into his iTunes folder back in 2003 or 2004 with it. I don’t remember when or what version exactly first had that command, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had been in there from the beginning.
Lastly, you don’t need to add an alias to the home music folder to your external drive for iTunes to find the library. I have my entire library contained on a 500 GB external FireWire drive connected to my PowerBook G4 12″, and nary an alias in site on the actual PowerBook drive. I moved my library over to the external, then deleted it from my PowerBook and opened iTunes. The first time, it popped up a message saying that iTunes needs a library to continue, and gave me the option of quitting, creating a new library, or browsing for a library. I simply browsed to my external, and voila. No aliases, no nothing. Every time after that, iTunes remembers that the library is on the external, and goes from there.
And if the external isn’t attached (or turned on) and I open iTunes, it just pops up that same dialog box, so I just hit quit if I don’t have my drive with me. And iTunes will still automatically connect to the library on the external after accidentally opening it without the external being connected the next time you connect (say that sentence five times fast).
February 6th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Contrary to what you assert in the beginning of the podcast, iTunes can stream to multiple speakers connected to different Airport Express stations. Just open the speaker list at the bottom of iTunes and you’ll find the option for multiple speakers.
I was surprised that iTunes could not just stream to multiple speakers but it can play music over the Mac’s built-in speakers in sync to the Airport Express stations. (At least iTunes 7.6 does that. I haven’t tried it with earlier versions)
February 6th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
when did that feature get added? I’m pretty sure that multiple speakers wasn’t there before!
February 6th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Is there any way to play music on my home mac through BTMM screen sharing and hear it at my work mac?
February 7th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Hi, Great show.
The music thing was very interesting,
I currently have a different itunes library on each of my macs (& PCs) ,then have library sharing turned on so I can play any tune on any mac from any other. I manually manage ipod transfers from whichever computer I’m working at.
However new idea for home isto put all music into single NAS drive and share it from there and use a Sonos zoneplayer to send the music round the house via wifi with full remote control.
Senuti is great, more slick than ipod liberator and ipod salvage really does what it says when your ipod gets mashed by the OS. (If you have a kernal panic on your mac while your ipod is connected, disconnect as quickly as possible.)
February 7th, 2008 at 8:35 am
There is a way to automate scraping the DRM through the analog hole: it is called DRM Dumpster (shareware). This thing rocks, and I can’t understand why people haven’t found it yet. You put a CD-RW into your computer and it will automate burning a DRM’d disc and will then re-rip that disc for you before moving on to the next without any intervention required by you. Set it up at night and come back to a library without DRM. Well, actually, there are both copies of your music there, so you have to go back and delete all the DRM’d versions. I scraped 634 songs (did I spend that much?) to be able to listen to my music on all of my lab, office and home computers. The other nice thing about this solution is that I believe it to be legal since you’ve gone through the analog hole.
February 7th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
btw John, “senuti” spelled backward is “itunes” not “ipod.” Just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point that out.
Also Connect360 works great for the xbox 360. It’s only $20 and it actually works better for me now than when I had my 360 connected to a windows machine. I really don’t like listening to music in my family room with the computer running, a stereo, a plasma tv, and a xbox. So I mainly just use it for video, and for music I just plop my ipod in a cradle.
February 7th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
uhhh… I got that wrong? I know my notes (see above) that I used to flow the show had that fact right. I must have misread what I wrote. oh well.
February 7th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I have a MBP C2D with a 120 GB hard drive. I originally had used the USB Disk on my Airport Extreme to host my iTunes Library, but this is very problematic because the MBP will lose connection to the AirPort Extreme and cause all heck with iTunes if you leave it open. I was also using an AppleTV with this setup and even though it was an ‘N’ network since it has to share the music via the MBP the performance was terrible.
I recently upgraded by connecting a computer via HDMI to my main TV and using it to share my Video content (sharing in iTunes for my MBP and streaming for my Apple TV) another benefit of this is that i can also view it on the TV its connected to. This allowed me to host all of my ‘music/audio’ content on my MBP since I only have about 60 or 70 GB of music. IMO, this is the best solution, you can carry your music anywhere, but you have unlimited storage for your Video content and can stream to multiple sources with great performance.
February 10th, 2008 at 3:36 am
The AudioEngine A5 speakers are great for this, my friend just got them and they have a power outlet and slot for the airport express! So my friend will be on his iPhone, and use Telekenisis (the program, he doesnt actually have wierd powers), to control his mac to make the speakers in the next room start blasting out music-people are usually blown away by this. Oh, and the reason that the airport express is not called Airport iTunes is because it is also a fully fledged mini-router, basically its an airport extreme that runs on 802.11.G and doesn’t have Ethernet routing. But it can share a printer and get up to 10 users on a mini wifi network, it also functions as a network extender for the airport extreme.
February 15th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Big fan of the show. I even subscribed to Audible through you guys, give some sponsorship love.
I’d love to see this expanded, an episode on say, sharing video, a mac media/NAS server. A mini htpc and the world of options that entails (for those who don’t go the aTV route). I’m a video professional and some of this stuff even makes my head spin.
February 18th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Again, another great show! Thanks for taking the time. I expect my (international) plastic dinosaur any day now.
PODCASTS:
I’d like to have some Podcasts that I get every ep. automatically
and some that I’ll pick & choose (not MacBreak/TWiT shows, obviously).
Is there a way of doing this with 1 library in iTunes, or should I make 2 libraries - one for ‘get all ASAP’ and another for ‘I’ll check you once a week, thanks’ ?
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Thought I’d add some late thoughts on my approach. For me the linchpin has been mt-daapd (fireflymediaserver.org), the open-source DAAP (aka iTunes music sharing) server. This guy runs on Windows, Unix and Mac OS X and can share out music to multiple systems.
So, for my system, I keep all my music and video on a file server (Ubuntu Linux if you must know), then use either Samba to share it out or mt-daapd to share to my iTunes clients. I also use the Roku SoundBridge M1001 (rokulabs.com) as a music playback device. Seems to work pretty well and is quite cheap ($150ish). Plays most formats including AAC and ALAC.
Only real issue is my wife’s iTunes library and managing it. She keeps a separate library on her PowerBook and syncs to it and then I just work with her to make sure all music is copied to the central server for backups and sharing.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Anyone know of tools similar to the ones mention that copy music/video files from iphone and/or apple tv to the mac? My google search didn’t turn up anything.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:05 am
HI just wanted to comment on a great show. I have worked for years to get this fleshed out in my house for myself, my wife, and our kids. My biggest impetus was that I live in an old house that proved too difficult to wire for whole house audio. I finally got it all put together nicely using a combination of airport express, tivo, airfoil, and slim-server (from the slimbox guys). Basically, what I do is run a slimserver on my fileserver (an old g4 mac) as well as airtunes. I have 3 tivos around the house plugged into tv’s and/or home theater setups. The Tivo can subscribe to a slimserver broadcast using an HME plugin and play it back through the stereo. I then have airfoil capturing the audio from the slimserver on the server and broadcasting it out to the airport expresses in the parts of the house that aren’t covered by the other stereos (e.g. out in the patio and the garage area). Finally, the kids have G3 imacs in their rooms that they use to play older educational games and listen to music (they’re great for playing lullabys and use almost no electricity most of the time) but also have a slimserver client running on them so I can subscribe to the music the rest of the house is listening to. I didn’t realize airfoil could broadcast directly to them, I’ll have to look into that as the slimclient software is a little heavy for the old beasts. The best part of this setup is on cleaning day when we all want to blast ‘cleaning music’ throughout the house! It’s also a nice solution in that we can turn off any part of the house we want or have it play something else entirely. The kids love it!
March 6th, 2008 at 3:46 am
Moved the iTunes Library to a USB disk through Airport Extreme and it works pretty well. Unfortunately, Rentals seem to fail.
I rented Shoot Em Up and watch the first hour as it downloaded. When it finished downloading, it was unwatchable on any machine, and couldn’t be moved to the iphone. The error wasn’t telling. Hitting play in iTunes simply refused to play but returned no error. For moving to the iPhone, it said “Cannot be copied to the iPhone” or something like that.
Thoughts? Anyone else running into this?
May 7th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
A tool I have been using lately to sync my home and work music libraries is Mojo: http://www.deusty.com/. It allows you to share via a local network or internet. A bit glitchy but pretty helpful.