I am using the 321 as the media storage center and using iTunes to play/manage music.
You have a couple of options. The first, and possibly easiest, is to use home sharing in iTunes. You'll need to have all of the computers on the same iTunes Store account. With Homesharing turned on, you can see the music on each computer when that computer is turned on and connected to your home network.
The downside here is that the computers must be in the house, turned on and connected. It sort of defeats the purpose of having a centralized storage device.
To use the 321 as I have, you'll have to think about what you want to do with your music. Do you want everyone to have access to the entire library while they are home? Or do you just want to have access to the content your kids have downloaded?
If it's the latter, I would move the main library to the 321 and use a sync utility to pull the files off the other computers. You can then set up the iTunes library on the 321 and have your main computer point to that library. (process explained below)
The first setup is a little trickier. If you want everyone to have access to the same library, the first trick is copying all of the music files to the NAS. Then, you'll need to rebuild the library using one of your computers (preferably one that is connected to the router with a cable, not wireless) and point each of the computers to the newly created library.
If you leave the music files on each of your kids computers, and just make a copy of it on the NAS, they should still be able to access their music when they are not connected to the network. I don't worry about this too much (all of my files are on the NAS) and I just use my iPhone to take music with me.
Once you have the music moved, here's what you'll need to do:
1. Open iTunes and change your library location to the folder on the NAS. I would also make sure "manage music" option is off, but "copy files when added to library is on."
2. Close iTunes
3. Reopen iTunes holding the "Shift" (PC) or "Option" (Mac) key when clicking the iTunes icon. You'll get a dialogue box that asks you if you want to create or open a new library. Choose Create.
4. Select Create New
5. You should get a blank iTunes library.
6. Verify that your media folder is still pointing to the folder on the 321 where you have stored your music files. Then use the "Add folder to Library Option" and select this folder.
7. Now wait. Depending on the size of your library, it will take a while as iTunes rebuilds the library database file. You can google iTunes on a NAS and read about editing the XML file to change the song location path to the server, but since you're talking about multiple computers with individual libraries, it will probably be easier to just let iTunes do the work.
8. When finished, iTunes should have saved a copy of the iTunes library file to the 321. Now when you start iTunes on the computer where you created the new library, it will grab that file from the 321.
To access that library on the other computers, when you start iTunes, hold the Shift/Option key, and select "Choose Library" and browse to the file on the NAS.
If you leave the library location unchanged in the preferences area on those machines, iTunes will point to the library file on the individual machines by default. This is good if you want to keep those individual libraries on the separate machines. If you don't then change the location of the library folder to the 321.
I would try this out with a few (50) songs to get the kinks worked out in your process (move just a few songs to the 321 to begin with). Once you have your own preferences established with folders/subfolders you can begin working with the entire library. It's easier to fix something that will bug you later if you aren't building a library of 5,000 songs over and over.
Hope this helps.
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Topic: DNS-321: Setup iTunes server of simply Map iTunes to folder on the 321? (Read 8586 times)