NAS Advice Needed

[vgrubb]

I'm considering an NAS for my music. Currently, I have a Mac and two PC's with music on external hard drives. I have two issues that I would like to understand before going this route. I have used PC's for years, but am relatively new to Mac's, so there are a lot of areas I am still learning about.

 

1 - I use a Mac Mini on my main stereo system. Since the NAS would be located in a adjacent room, the Mini would have to access the NAS wirelessly. Would this create any problems? I am using a D-Link DIR-655 router.

 

2 - I want to be able to manage the music on the NAS with a PC. This is probably the biggest concern I have. I currently have ~ 1300 discs ripped in both FLAC and AIFF. All new music is going through three rips, one for each computer. I would like to do all ripping and tag changes/corrections in iTunes on my main PC and use the Mini strictly for music playback. I'm sure there are issues here as far as keeping the library up to date in iTunes on the Mini. I would also like to access the FLAC files from my two PC's from the NAS. I use dbPoweramp for FLAC ripping. The AIFF conversion in dbPoweramp seems to work very good when I have tried it.

 

I'm also curious how J River sounds with AIFF files. This could eliminate the need for two formats if the above works okay.

 

Thanks,

Vic

 

[Audio_ELF]

1. If at all possible I would try to drill a hole through the wall to connect the MacMini to the NAS with a cable. If you really can't ... wireless should be okay ... but wired eliminates an area where problems / setup issues can occur. Don't get me wrong ... you're 75-90% likely to be fine with wireless, I just find wired to be more reliable.

 

2. Syncing two copies of iTunes can be done with this ... https://www.socketheadstudios.com/mytunesync/ ... but I've never tried it so don't ask me if it works well. I would ensure you have good backup to begin. Other similar programs are around too.

 

Let us know how you get on if you use myTunesSync or similar as I'm sure others would be grateful of your feedback.

Eloise

 

PS ... MacWorld website report on the sync software ... http://www.macworld.com/article/133881/2008/07/syncitunes.html