iTunes Around the House

[jeb1]

Hi,

I know there are loads of threads on this already but i want to get the opinions for my situation.

At the moment i have a macbook pro with my iTunes library on it, an iPhone and an apple tv (i also have a base station and external hard drive in cupboard doing nothing)

What i want to do is be able to listen to my iTunes on apple tv and airport express linked to stereo (if and when i buy one) but without having to have my macbook on all the time messing the battery up. However i want something that i don't have to go and turn on to use i can just control from my phone.

I see a lot of people use a mac mini to do this. Is this the most cost effective way and if so what is the lowest spec mac mini i could do it on? Also can i keep my itunes folder on my mac too i do i just do home sharing on the mini?


I'm not to fussed about streaming movies as i do this off ice films on the apple tv. I keep meaning to build my own movie collection but i think by the time I've spent time build an HD collection we will be onto super HD. Anway if i do decide to build a collection i can plug my hard drive into my base station and access the files through xbmc on apple tv so that is not an issue.

 

[hafr]

Hi,

I know there are loads of threads on this already but i want to get the opinions for my situation.

At the moment i have a macbook pro with my iTunes library on it, an iPhone and an apple tv (i also have a base station and external hard drive in cupboard doing nothing)

What i want to do is be able to listen to my iTunes on apple tv and airport express linked to stereo (if and when i buy one) but without having to have my macbook on all the time messing the battery up. However i want something that i don't have to go and turn on to use i can just control from my phone.

I see a lot of people use a mac mini to do this. Is this the most cost effective way and if so what is the lowest spec mac mini i could do it on? Also can i keep my itunes folder on my mac too i do i just do home sharing on the mini?


I'm not to fussed about streaming movies as i do this off ice films on the apple tv. I keep meaning to build my own movie collection but i think by the time I've spent time build an HD collection we will be onto super HD. Anway if i do decide to build a collection i can plug my hard drive into my base station and access the files through xbmc on apple tv so that is not an issue.

You don't have to have your MacBook Pro running all the time. If it's in sleep mode, it will be woken up when you want to access the iTunes library from your other devices. And it's not going to mess your battery up.

But since you're ATV2 is jailbroken, you can move all your music to the external drive and connect it to your AEBS, then play it in XBMC.