itunes without a computer
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- Wolfboy
Just thought I'd ask you guys if any of you had experience of running iTunes without turning your computer on.
What I want to attempt to do is stream all my digital music to my hi-fi system, probably using a NAS drive, I guess using air play (I'm on mac/iphone/ipad).
But, I don't want to have to switch my mac on to do this. It seems a bit of a waste of power and general mac wear & tear to have all my music sat on a drive to then have to send it to my mac to then send it to the hi-fi.
I've been reading about being able to run an itunes server on some NAS drives and I've seen a Cambridge network player that looks pretty good.
So as I say, I wondered if anyone had got any experience of setting something like this up?
- uan0
Sonos, Apple TV, Squeezebox...
and UNITIQUTE http://www.naimaudio.com/hifi-pr…- Apple TV doesn't have storage anymore. So no good for thisanimatedgif
- orrinward0
How set on itunes are you? My music setup was a netbook hooked up to NAS, so I haven't done a no-computer itunes rig.
I do however use XBMC for all video stuff, and it handles audio too. Not sure on how good the product is, but it's an alternative you can put on any of the boxes mentioned above. Well, most of em.
- Wolfboy0
cheers for the answers.
Uan, the Naim stuff looks really interesting. I think I'll have to look into their stuff. Also, I hadn't really thought about Sonos because I have friend who has that throughout his flat and he runs it off a computer. But I've just done a quick search and their help pages say you can use their equipment without one on after the initial set up.
orrinward, I'm not sentimentally attached to iTunes or anything, if something else would work better for this then I'd switch.
- XBMC is amazing for movies and Tv Shows. It does do music but I don't use it for that., so I can't give an opinion.orrinward
- monospaced0
I use an Apple TV to play music to my hi-fi system every day. Even though my iMac has to be on to serve the music, it works fine asleep. At least it seems like it's asleep (no hd noise, just a pulsating light). So, don't worry about the power wasting, it's probably less than you think.
- "Even though my iMac has to be on to serve the music, it works fine asleep" HAHA WHAT?animatedgif
- When my Mac is asleep, it still serves music. That's what.monospaced
- monospaced0
Also, the Remote App for the iPad/iPhone in conjunction with the Apple TV and iTunes is radtastic! Highly recommended.
- Wolfboy0
Just in case anyone was thinking about doing anything similar I went with the following and I can highly recommend this as it is all running smoothly after about a months usage:
A QAP TS-212 NAS Drive
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/produ…This streams to everything in my place wirelessly, plus you can make wired connections too.
Plus I got a Cambridge NP30 streamer for my hi-fi
http://www.richersounds.com/prod…So I've now got my entire music and video collection available without the need for my computer being on and most of it is controlled by iPad/iPhone apps.
- monospaced0
What I do is have my Mac boot up, launch iTunes automatically, and then I pull the stream from the machine. It works when the machine is asleep and if I'm playing music and I reboot the machine, the music plays uninterrupted. I think there's some kind of buffer in play and I'm always amazed that my Mac is sound asleep while it's serving data. Good stuff.