TUAW How To: Use your iTunes library over AirPort Disk

Last September we showed you how to keep your iTunes library on an external hard drive. While doing the same thing over an AirPort Disk with Apple's new AirPort Extreme Base Station sounds like it should more or less be the same situation, there are a couple of new catches to be aware of. Never fear, though - we'll outline what you need to know to truly snip the wires on your iTunes library.

First, in order to do this right, we recommend backing up your library before snipping any cables (we also don't recommend actually snipping any cables; they can be expensive to replace). If you haven't gotten into the backup habit yet, Scott's How to Back your music using iTunes 7 tutorial is a great place to start.

Now, on with the show.

We'll begin by assuming you have already set up your AEBS (AirPort Extreme Base Station) and that you have the hard drive you're planning to use. We recommend not hooking the drive up to the AEBS just yet, as moving the typical iTunes library filled with a few GB of stuff would go a lot faster via USB than even the zippier new 802.11n wireless. With that said, and with iTunes shut down, let's get started:

Begin just as you would with our external hard drive tutorial by plugging your USB drive directly into your Mac (the AEBS is USB-only, which means some of you might have to buy a new drive just for doing stuff like this with your new base station).
Next, move the "iTunes Music" folder, located in ~/Music/iTunes/, to wherever you want on your external hard drive. If you also have an "iPod Games" folder in there, move that too. Just be sure to keep them together no matter where you decide to place them. Leave the Album Artwork folder, as well as the three individual library files right where they are.
Wait a while. If you have a large library (ours was over 40GB), wait a long while.
Once the transfer is finished, unmount the drive and hook it up to the AEBS. Give the two devices a little time to make nice.
The AEBS by default is set to automatically mount any connected drives on your Mac (or PC), however, a strange quirk happened here: we received a dialog asking to connect to the drive with a password, even though we had never actually set up the drive with the new AirPort Utility. Of course, setting the drive to auto-mount when you connect to your AEBS network would be ideal if you want no-fuss use with iTunes (and any other 'wireless library' setups like this), but the choice is entirely up to you. Pressing cancel on this dialog, setting up the AirPort Utility to use a password for the drive and then setting it to save the pass in Keychain got us back on our way.
Speaking of choices, you have another one to make: once you open iTunes again, it will still be looking at your local library. We need to tell iTunes the party has moved to the remote drive connected to your AEBS, and you have three options (that we know of) for accomplishing this. Your first option is to open iTunes and go to the Advanced > General tab and use the "Change..." button to tell it where your new "iTunes Music" library lives. Your second option is to give iTunes a kick-in-the-pants before you open it by moving your local /iTunes/ folder to somewhere other than where it currently resides, then opening iTunes. To be honest, we had to go with a unique combination of the two that you *shouldn't* have to deal with, but we're posting it here just in case: We actually had to move our entire /iTunes/ library to the external drive (including the Album Artwork folder and those three library files that previously shouldn't be moved), then completely delete the local copy of that /iTunes/ folder in order for iTunes to actually obey the new library location we set under that Advanced preferences tab. Like we said though: that third one isn't pretty, and it isn't recommended as your first choice.
Either way, once everything is in its place and you choose the new library location, iTunes will likely pop up a progress window telling you that it's re-analyzing your library. That's fine - iTunes is just double-checking your handiwork.
As a final check to make sure this all went as planned, click on any library file from within iTunes and press cmd + i (or View > Get Info). At the bottom of the Summary tab in that window is a "Where:" section that tells you the actual file path to that piece of media; be sure that path begins with the name of your AEBS-connected drive, and not "Macintosh HD," or whatever you happened to rename your main hard drive to.

That's it! As long as the proper file path is there for at least one of your files, the rest of your stuff should all be residing in the same remote location. You should now be able to rock out with your iTunes library wirelessly, though there are certainly some catches to be aware of:

The fantastic "Consolidate Library" option under iTunes's Advanced menu might become your best friend if you happen to add a lot of media (or automatically download podcasts) while you're away from your wireless network. iTunes is smart in situations like this, but it doesn't tell you it's working some magic behind the scenes: when you're away from your media library, perhaps connected to another network or on the other side of the planet, any content you add to iTunes will be placed in that local ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ library that we just got done leaving in the dust. This, of course, might begin to annoy the manual organizers in the audience, but this is why we love the genius of Apple's software engineers: once you're connected to your media library again (and this works with our AEBS setup or an external hard drive via USB/FireWire), using that "Consolidate Library" option will tell iTunes to move all of your new media into your true library's location. In this case, since your library is on a drive connected wirelessly, iTunes will shuffle everything over to that drive. Easy breezy library management that takes a mere two clicks.
You might notice some iTunes operations become at least a little sluggish, such as using Get Info on a file or beginning to play a video. This is natural and, at least from our limited experience so far, nothing to worry about. Just know that some things won't be insta-snappy like they were when your library was non-wireless and on a local hard drive, but music, including skipping tracks, seems to remain pretty quick with this setup.
We haven't had a chance to try streaming our library over the web using the AEBS's new ability to open itself up to remote access. It should be entirely possible in theory, but there are plenty of factors that could affect performance on both ends, and streaming your library could turn out to be flaky or even unusable.
We wouldn't recommend this as a solution for sharing as a library repository across multiple machines unless you're up for a little bit of repetitive effort from here on out. The problem is: every time Machine A adds a file into the library, Machine B won't know it unless you chose File > Add to Library... and select the entire /iTunes Music/ library for a re-scan. Of course, you could always manually add new files to each machine from here on out, but you can still run into quirks such as inconsistencies in metadata (ratings, etc.) and things like album art being overwritten or even deleted. If you really want to go down this path, however, you might be able to automate this manual library updating via Automator or AppleScript, but you're on your own there.

That should about cover it. Snipping the wires on your iTunes library might not be a simple 1-2-3 process, but we wanted to be sure and cover as many bases and workflow quirks as possible. As usual, feel free to ask questions and post your own tips and workarounds in the comments.

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scott

I have two problems, don't know if they're related, but both are giving me a big headache. One (perhaps related to post 39, not sure) is that the music files on my Lacie harddrive (attached to the AEBS) disappear. When I click on my iTunes folder icon from my iBook G4 (wirelessly connected), the folders start appearing and as they all come up, they all disappear and the info bar says 0 GB on Disk. What's up with that?

Also, when I play music via iTunes remotely from the AEBS harddrive, the music stops frequently. I have about 100 GB of music on the drive. Is there any hope that Apple Tech service might help?
Thanks for the help!

May 05 2007 at 1:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jason

Awesome post - Exactly what I was looking for.

So, what about "Use your iPHOTO library over airport disk"? Does that work similarly? i.e. can you move photos to the airport disk and re-point iPhoto to the new folder?

April 30 2007 at 11:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

scully

Question: I already have my iTunes library on an external HD which is currently connected directly to my eMac. I just bought an AEBS and would like to connect this same HD to it in order to share the iTunes library. I plan to connect the eMac directly to the AEBS. Will this be as easy as just connecting the external HD with the iTunes library to the AEBS?

I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks.

April 18 2007 at 7:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Quasimime

Scratch #41...found the answer at:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305040

April 04 2007 at 5:11 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Quasimime

I've followed the instructions and my one hang-up, which I hope isn't too OT. I bought a new 500GB LaCie HD (already formatted for Mac) and attached it to the AEBS. By default, it's name is long and weird - something like Cpe#####cbd#a### (you get the idea).

How do I change the disk's name? There's nothing in Airport Utility to do this? Grrr.

April 04 2007 at 4:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Keng

I have to say that I am totally pissed off by the issue no being able to see some files which disappeared after I copy onto the external hard drive.

Yes, I think special characters cause the issue. I have Japanese, Chinese, and English files trying to store on my hard drive and always, it is alway non-English files disappeared.

I've re-formated the drive, and it still happened. No mention how much time I've wasted, I am still very angery about it and feel very frustrated.

The other thing I hate about Airport Extreme (N), is that, it is very slow, espcially when moving small files, a lot of them, at same time. I would not buy it now. Wait till Apple comes up with the fixes.

March 28 2007 at 12:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gerly

I have the same problem of music files just disappearing.
Buying an AEBS and hooking on an external HD seemed an excellent idea and then moving my itunes library there so i could acces it on my pc as well....My windows machine can *NOT* see any music inside my itunes library on the airport disk! everything else on the disk is visible, I enabled hidden files to be visible and even tried the "dir /a" option in command line. It's not there, but there is some 'dark matter' because the file sizes don't add up. When i renamed the root of the itunes library most of the music became visible.(and available for my windows machine)But somehow some others haven't and these aren't visible to my macbook anymore either....This must be an itunes issue since all the other files on this WD500gb are visible.
I cleaned out this 'renamed' itunes library, and 'added' the files manually to itunes again. They remain visible now, but what a hassle.

March 13 2007 at 1:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rick

Here's a question:

I have a Macbook and an Airport Extreme. I will eventually be getting an external hard drive to use with the Airport Extreme and I will also be getting an Apple TV eventually.

I understand the need to have a copy of iTunes open and running in order for the stream to Apple TV to work.

However, as far as raw data goes, is it going to be intelligent enough to stream directly from the Airport Extreme to the Apple TV, or, is the path going to be Airport Extreme to Macbook to Apple TV.

I ask because my Macbook is an original one and therefore is not 802.11n compatible.

March 12 2007 at 6:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chuck

This was exactly my intention for buying the AEBS. Unfortunately, I've run into a few snags that prevent this from being at all worthwhile and if I can't get it worked out, I may end up returning it.

* On my MBP, things seemed to have gone smoothly, until I sync my iPod. At that time, I noticed that some files appeared to "disappear" from the HD on the AEBS. I plugged the HD back directly into my MBP and the files were still there--the AEBS just doesn't know how to share them. After spending an hour on the phone with support, I got nowhere. They basically told me I need to reformat my drive because I have a corrupt "fork."

* Second issue came when trying to set up the disk to be accessible from a Windows machine. The AirPort disk utility was useless, giving a "Unknown user, login, or password..." error every time. This could be solved by going to start->run and typing //AEBS_name/drive_name/ and hitting enter. So now I was on the drive and navigated to the iTunes music folder, except absolutely NONE of the folders appeared. In the windows address bar, I could easily type the artist name and get directly to the folder, but I could not import the library into iTunes or view the list. Another hour on the phone with Apple and they concluded I would need to go see a Genius at the store.

One note regarding the first (Mac) issue: it appears to impact files that have strange characters in them. Such as that funky AE character and the e's with accents. Perhaps the AEBS (or SMB/CIFS) has issues with this? Makes it useless for having a library that contains a lot of latin, world, or Tool's AEnima album...

March 11 2007 at 11:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Menhir

I'm surprised that nobody has raised this question yet, but, am interested to know how iTunes on the external drive syncs to iPods? If for example, you don't have a desktop and connect only wirelessly, can you hook up your iPod to your notebook, which will then sync music via iTunes (semi)wirelessly?

Also, if you were to have two notebooks, could you connect two separate iPods to the two notebooks and be able to sync both iPods via the two different notebooks? I realize there are various issues with two computers accessing the same library, but that aside, is the iPod sync process even possible?

March 11 2007 at 11:15 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply