Lumin, NAS and Itunes....Can they live together

[Roy Boy]

I just recently purchased a Lumin and am in the process of acquiring a NAS. Leaning toward Synology DS1513 or DS1813 to allow for growth. Prior to Lumin I had an Apple TV to stream music out of itunes that was mostly stored on my son's iMac. My son has been wanting a NAS for a long time so he can offload the itunes music or at least back it up to the NAS. All (most) of the music in itunes has been ripped as AIFF. My wife recently got a new Macbook Air that I plan to use for ripping music to the NAS with an external blu-ray drive. I do plan to have Hi-Res music including DSD. The Lumin and Synology would be connected

via GigE to my secondary Actiontec Fios router that is upstairs co-located in the media room.

My goal would be to have one respository of music on the NAS that I could use to stream through the Lumin to my two channel system...but also be able to use iTUnes to stream to other rooms in the house with computers and/or appleTVs. I realize that for AppleTV I am limited to 16/44, but I am fine with that. My questions are:

 

1) Can I share a common music repository between iTunes and Lumin? (I suspect no)

 

2) If I cannot do the above, could I back up my son's iTunes library onto the NAS and then have access to that content

via the Lumin?

 

3) I also plan to use the NAS as a repository for pictures, computer backups, etc. I am wondering if it would be recommended to have one volume on the NAS for music and a separate volume for the other stuff (pics, backups, etc).

 

This is my first NAS at home in case that is not obvious..Thanks for sharing your insights and expertise.

[Audio_ELF]

I assume the LUMIN can play back AIFF...

 

If so then transfer your iTunes library to the NAS.

 

Set up the UPnP server to look at the Music folder within the iTunes library.

 

Now set up a separate folder for DSD downloads; if using Minimserver then you can point the UPnP to this folder too.

 

Eloise

[wappinghigh]

I concur what Eloise said, having been down a similar path. Though sooner or later you are going to drift further and further away from iTunes. One factor will be the maintenance of an iTunes library on a NAS. The other has been stated: lack of full file format support like DSD and Flac... Yes, sure I know you can port a library to a NAS, but long term you will find Apple just either doesn't get the NAS philosophy or are plain against it. Long story short, consider ditching iTunes altogether right now and move the entire music library under MinimServer. That's what I've done. I still run iTunes for other content like movies etc. it's just I've separated off my music... hope this helps.