It’s a Mini Adventure – iTunes
When I had the TViX setup, my iTunes music lived on an SMB share that I could access from my laptop (for ripping CDs and updating my iPod) and from the TViX (for playing through the amp). It worked pretty well on the TViX side, but relied on the network share always being mounted. If I happened to launch iTunes without the share being mounted, it would reset the default music directory to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music and anything subsequently ripped would end up there rather than on the network share. This was a ballache to sort out.
I experimented with a similar setup with the Mini, but swiftly came to the conclusion that as mounting network shares isn’t something that can easily be done using the Apple Remote, it wasn’t a great idea from an ease-of-use point of view. The easiest option seemed to be to have the iTunes library live in the default location on the Mac Mini so it would always be available, and access it remotely from the laptop when required.
To share an iTunes library on a host computer (in this case the Mac Mini) with a remote one (Macbook), the host machine needs to have file sharing switched on and the remote must be connected to it as a user with Read / Write privileges. Launch iTunes on the remote machine while holding down Option and it will prompt you to either choose an iTunes library or create a new one. Navigate to the location of the iTunes library on the host computer and select that library. Now, when opening iTunes on the remote machine, it will read and write to the iTunes library on the host computer. A slight drawback is that only one machine can have iTunes open at any one time, but as Front Row and Plex can both play music from the iTunes library without iTunes having to be open, I didn’t consider this to be too much of a problem.
Another advantage of doing it this way, rather than simply altering the location of the music files in iTunes -> Preferences -> Advanced is that it avoids the default location problem that I experienced with the TViX setup.
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