iTunes uploading to firefly

@Gnits wrote:

You are soo responsive. Not something i am used to from other forums and things i use online.

When I’m not in Dallas. 🙂

I left yesterday at 2:00 am, and just got back right now (11:00pm, my time). Oof. Talk about a long day. 🙂

If i move the directory over to the slug and set up itunes to use it over the network, can i rsync without creating two copies of the music. IE, my itunes uses it directly but my son who just listens to it, can use it as an iTunes server?

If you move the directory over to the slug (by changing the path in iTunes), then you can maintain just the single copy of the music. But your playlists and stuff will still be in your “my music” directory.

On way around that would be to just copy the “iTunes Music Library.xml” to the directory on the slug. Then it would get picked up the next time it scanned. Or set up a batch file that runs at logon from your startup group, or schedule it as a scheduled task in the control panel.

Additionally, what IS this rsync tool. (a link would be just fine as opposed to a long description).

Just a directory syncronization program. http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/. Works best unix to unix, so if you are using mac, it works fine. If windows, I’d recommend Unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ instead. Or “robocopy”, which might be in XP now, or at least available from MS from one of their download pages.

But if you move your directory to the server, you won’t need to do that.

I understand that you also cannot use songs on the shared resource to sync to an ipod? Is this something that can be worked around without having to ditch iTunes entirely. I may be in the minority, but I actually do like iTunes with the usual caveats…

Correct. Unless you either:

1. Sync your copy of iTunes to the server (which then serves as a backup of your music) and maintain your iPod on your computer, and just use the server for guest browsing, or disconnected via laptop, or via soundbridge or whatever.

or

2. Move the directory for iTunes to the server (like you mentioned) and maintain the iPod from the iTunes instance that is actually connected to the files.

(hate drm…)

/me nods.

It seems that there is still so much to be done to realize all this potential. Next thing i want to do is start taking my movies and start importing them into something (iTunes) and start viewing them on my TVs and such. Real exciting stuff here…

Any suggestions on things I can start looking at with these new things to start getting more out of what i have? Suggestions about where this is going, and such?

The AppleTV is worth looking at if you use iTunes as a server. Won’t stream from a firefly server (drm again…).

A modded XBOX running xbox media center is a nice TV hub also. Check that out — read up on it. I use it a *lot* as a media player.

At some point (soonish) I hope to have a upnp front-end for this thing to play media that way, but will probably be at least a month.

— Ron