I’ve been watching some Apple forum posts about the AirPort Extreme base station. It seems there’s some debate as to whether or not an iTunes library can be moved over to a USB 2.0 drive attached to the AirPort Extreme, thereby making the iTunes library available to wireless computers on the network.
Some folks are hearing that it is not possible. Some are told that it’s “theoretically possible but unsupported by Apple.” Bah! Come on!
Hosting an iTunes library via AirPort Disk is 100% possible. It’s also very easy. Setting it up is exactly the same as moving an iTunes library to a USB 2.0 or Firewire disk hard-wire connected to your computer. (My post today isn’t a how-to, it’s simply a confirmation that something can be done.)Here’s an image of one of my songs in iTunes – you’ll see that the media file itself is on the AirPort Disk drive, which I’ve named “AIRDISK 250″ (representing 250GB).
Probably one of the more important things to note is the amount of wireless bandwidth iTunes songs take up while playing. I used Activity Monitor and Menu Meters to track these stats. Both apps gave the same result – the average bandwidth required is about 33KB/s.
Obviously, using 33KB/s for iTunes will have almost no effect whatsoever on the rest of your AirPort Extreme use.The only thing I would highly suggest prior to moving an iTunes library to the AirPort Disk, is doing a FULL backup of your entire iTunes library to another hard drive or even to DVDs. Better safe than sorry.
Good luck!
Comments