About to make the switch- a few questions

[Mrhighdef]

Hi all

Not sure where to put this, hope its in the right spot. Anyways I am making the switch from pc to Mac, and have a few questions

I have an external 3tb hard drive connected to a ready share netgear router, it has all my files and obviously is formatted for a pc. I plan to buy a MacBook (haven't decided yet on which one) but anything above 512 gb ssd is out of my price range. My thinking was why not add another partition to my external and format it for Mac. I have a huge music collection on the hard drive, and was wondering if its possible to keep the music off my future MacBook, and sync to iTunes/iPod thru the ready share connected hard drive. Obviously I would have to transfer files to the newly partitioned section, but I could delete them off my mac once its transferred. So is this possible? And if so, any suggestions on the easiest way to do so? Thanks in advance

 

[benwiggy]

If this network drive has its own server, then you may not need to reformat -- or indeed, the server may not like that.

Doing a quick google for "itunes library on network drive" brings up lots of detail of how people have done this.

 

[hallux]

I have a Netgear router, I'm fairly certain an NTFS drive plugged into it is writeable by the Mac.

 

[satcomer]

Plus if you have a server that you can use SMB to get into it then don't fret about Time Machine on a SMB network drive. Just read/watch the blog post Configuring OS X Mountain Lion Time Machine to Work With CIFS (SMB) Share.

Plus if you want to have you iTunes (it works a lot better on a Mac than the PC version) Library to an external drive then bookmark the tech post How to move an iTunes library to an external drive

Lastly to really know how to use a Mac consider getting the funny/easy to read book Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition. IMHO having this book (even as a reference book) will greatly help a new Mac user coming from Windows.

 

[ColdCase]

Yeah you will not likely need or want to reformat that network drive, should work just fine with the mac.

Not knowing what format your music collection is in, but usually iTunes will want to import and convert to its format. As mentioned above, set iTunes to use the network drive to save its library and let it convert, it will import and save the music into its own library folder.

On the other hand, if your netgear has a music server, you may not need iTunes at all.

 

[benwiggy]

usually iTunes will want to import and convert to its format.

No. iTunes does not convert music files added to its database by default. It leaves them as AIFF, MP3, AAC, whatever.
Also, you can set iTunes prefs to make its own copy of the file in its library (wherever that may be), or simply to use the original file wherever it is on the disk.