Products and Tools
ITunes, Laptops, and networks
Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 18 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.
20 Jan 2006
I recently moved all my audio files over to a NAS drive on my home network so they can be played from any computer in the house. For my wife and my kids, it’s seamless, since their desktops are always on the network. Any new music goes straight to the network drive and then all the computers can see it. (There’s a little issue with keeping the iTunes library in sync, but there’s software that does that.)
I have a laptop. That laptop goes places, as laptops are wont to do. When it goes places that aren’t in reach of my home network it would be nice to still play some music. What I want is to have a small collection of music, ideally updated by managing an iTunes playlist, that sits on my hard drive. This small collection would be drawn from the main collection on the NAS.
In short, what I want is some software that will make a folder on my PowerBook act like an iPod. Change a playlist and the folder syncs to the main music collection. Any ideas, suggestions, or tricks? Surely I can’t be the only person with this problem.
update: I think I have a solution.