Importing music via remote disc on MacBook Air

[jameskohn]

Just get the SuperDrive

The SuperDrive is $99 and it's about the size of 2 cd jewel cases. If you need to carry it around, it will take up about the same amount of room in your bag as carrying a couple of cd's! Otherwise, it can just live in a drawer at your home or office to be used as needed.

Why sweat all that other stuff when you can just plug this thing in and it works like a charm. It's so nice not having to take with you the 99.9% of the time when you're not going to need it, but having it available when you do need it. What a wonderful, convenient solution!

 

[OS X Dude]

The SuperDrive is $99 and it's about the size of 2 cd jewel cases. If you need to carry it around, it will take up about the same amount of room in your bag as carrying a couple of cd's! Otherwise, it can just live in a drawer at your home or office to be used as needed.

Why sweat all that other stuff when you can just plug this thing in and it works like a charm. It's so nice not having to take with you the 99.9% of the time when you're not going to need it, but having it available when you do need it. What a wonderful, convenient solution!

But it's still an inconvenience, a flaw. Something I can't bear to see on Apple gear.

I also pin that SuperDrive as the reason Remote Disc won't import CD's, play films or burn discs (possible with 802.11n for sure). After all, that'd make the drive obsolete wouldn't it, apart from those times where no other drive is available.

Course, you could always stick the SD to the bottom of the MBA and argue it has an optical drive

 

[Freyqq]

Well, you could always install iTunes on your Windows PC, rip your songs there, and then WiFi them over to your MBA. Remember: If you have Remote Disc, that means your MBA and your remote machine both have WiFi. So copying files over once they've been ripped should be easy as cake. (Piece of pie? You know what I mean.)

Oh, and something else you should look into is Microsoft's RDC client for the Mac. It lets you take over a Windows PC from your Mac and drive it. Go to mactopia.com to download it (it's free).

sounds like the best idea

not to mention, streaming it over wifi saves disk space on a small hd. If you want to take the songs with you, just copy the files over after they're ripped on the other computer.

 

[bilbo--baggins]

Wow that's bad. I remember the original presentation for the MacBook Air - Steve Jobs made it clear that you could use a CD/DVD drive from another computer as though it was in the MacBook Air. At the time I viewed this with some suspicion because of past experiences.

This seems like a real con. For quite some time it's been possible to access files from a CD/DVD drive on the network - but with the introduction of the MacBook Air they made it sound as though this was far beyond that capability - to behave as though the CD/DVD was actually connected directly to the MacBook Air.

If they had come out and said - you don't need a CD/DVD drive because you can access them remotely, the replies would have been - yes, but what about DVD movies, what about CD's in iTunes, what about DVD discs for games with copy protection etc etc. Their solution inferred that all of these limitations had been taken care of.

 

[clayj]

Their solution inferred that all of these limitations had been taken care of.

Actually, I think you mean "implied", not "inferred". The solution implied something, or you inferred something.

And I never read it that way, sorry. Although it's perhaps not common knowledge, there are a lot of us out here who understand that there are degrees of usability. Just because I can access a CD or DVD drive remotely does not mean that I can use all of the special technologies (like ASPI) that have grown up around it to increase its data throughput, etc. You have to understand that the amount of data being moved around during, say, DVD playback can far exceed the capacity of any wireless network; so how would you expect that to work wirelessly?

By the same token, as I explained earlier in this thread, programs like iTunes expect to be able to talk directly to the CD drive, not through some intermediary such as a network. You can't rip CDs across a wired network, either.

So although I am more than willing to gig Apple when they do something dumb, this is not one of those cases.

 

[maroquai]

You actually can

SOLUTION...

I originally thought you should be able to burn a CD to your MacBookAir library through using the remote disk from the devices menu in your finder. But no such luck.

The work around, even though a bit odd, is to have file sharing setup on both devices, and simply Add to library --> select the shared computer's library (not remote disk, but the one under the "shared" list in finder.) And connect as the user, using the CD's computers name and psw. Then navigate to the CD and voilà.

Importing is possible.

Sorry if I'm not very clear.

M