Using FireWire to help speed up the iTunes Home Sharing process

You guys DO realize that many people do not have an ethernet crossover cable lying around, have a laptop - desktop config and thus a use for this guide? Of course, any experienced user will have set up a fast network in-between his machines, but your average user is _not_ experienced, only has a wireless connection for his laptop and often no ethernet cables whatsoever, let alone crossover gigabit. And to that kind of user, this kind of guide is a good thing - I have no idea whether you could have set it up better, but it's still not useless.

FYI, You don't even need CAT5e to get Gigabit Speeds over short distances. CAT5 is just the rating which means it's guaranteed to work at 10/100 Speeds but in my experience a plain old CAT5 Cable gets speeds of 1000 just as well as a CAT5e or CAT6 cable does. You can check your LINK speed by opening up the Network Utility and looking at the Link Speed of the interface in question (Ethernet or Airport). FYI, with the newer Dual-Band Airports I connect at 300 Megabits which comes close to FireWire 400 Speeds but Gigabit Ethernet still rules the day for speed!

I haven't notices that Home Sharing over Fast ethernet to Wireless-G to be all that slow.
I've just transferred several hundred songs between my laptop and my son's old G4 tower. Transfers took seconds. Even whole albums were done before I could find and highlight the next set of songs.

It's a lot faster than dragging the songs over manually from the itunes music folder.

Seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist

802.11n is significantly faster than 802.11g if you're doing anything that requires a lot of data to come through the pipe (screen sharing, large file transfers, etc), at least in my personal real world experience. For just casual surfing, of course not. True, it won't beat a FireWire or Gigabit ethernet connection, but 802.11n would generally be faster than regular 100mb ethernet.

Frankly, I don't bother with Home Sharing, other than the file-sharing kind.

I have a server setup with hard drive access. Anyone can purchase an NAT instead and provide mount-on-your-desktop server space for users. Copy music on to this device.

Then, in iTunes uncheck "Copy music", and drag song files from the music share to your iTunes library. If you want to copy the music to your computer, check the box.

Now, you will have hard drive space free, but music available to your computer. The disadvantage is that you will not have it copied to your computer, but you have an iPhone or iPod that synced anyway, right?

Re: Ethernet

Make these kinds of transfers much easier.

I have two mac laptops that both connect wirelessly. I have a "Home" network location where each ethernet port is given a static IP, i.e. 192.168.200.1-2. Now, having configured that once, I can just connect the two machines anytime I want to do a quick, large transfer. Easy.

I think the main criticisms of this 'hint' are based on the fact that its a lot of dicking around for little real-world gain, except "look what I can do!" (The MacAddict comment was dead on).

Not that there is anything wrong with "stupid mac tricks with a firewire cable" :p

Did anybody read the last paragraph of this post?

The author is not suggesting this hookup every time you want to share your music, just the first time when the two computers music libraries may be off by 20 to 30 gigs, as mine is.

Thereafter, the wireless transfer of incremental changes is obviously easier and quick enough.

Homesharing is a nice idea but until iTunes 9 actually becomes stable it is a waste of time. Every time I try and copy anything on any of my Macs I get a few songs through the list before iTunes crashes on one of the machines. Apple needs to update iTunes9 pronto.

What a cry baby author. Go order a pizza and then come back.