iTunes Match to save disk space

[olemrboston]

Op here. Thanks everyone for the replies. To clarify, I do back all of my music and other files up onto an external drive, I'd just rather not be chained to that drive to listen to my music. I'm also curious as to how easy Apple will make it to download just a few songs at a time from iTunes in the cloud. For example, could I download a whole playlist that I'd made before I matched, or would I have to manually remember and select each of the songs in the playlist for individual download?

1.) If you do not want to lug around your hard drive. The two cheapest alternatives would be to wireless remote access one of your home computer's iTunes and play your media over air through your other home computer. OR (do what I did for my MBA) Attach an external hard drive to your wireless router and access your media anywhere you have a wifi connection. Most places have wireless nearby to either stream the information directly to your MBA or momentarily use the free wifi to download your media to your HDD on the MBA.

2.) If my memory serves me right the iCloud feature will download your purchased content through iTunes to your other "i" devices. I do not believe that you can directly stream from the cloud but pull information from it to store on your physical HDD. So yes, you can download your whole playlist iTunes or not assuming you have iTunes match.

 

[sjrogers]

1.) OR (do what I did for my MBA) Attach an external hard drive to your wireless router and access your media anywhere you have a wifi connection. Most places have wireless nearby to either stream the information directly to your MBA or momentarily use the free wifi to download your media to your HDD on the MBA.

Op again. Thanks again to everyone. I'm interested in this particular option. I live on a college campus. If I read this correctly, you're saying I could hook up a hard drive full of my music to my router back home (across the country from where I go to school), then stream/download it to my MBA using the university's wifi? If I got new music, would it then be possible to send it in the other direction, from MBA back to hard drive? This seems like a much easier option than iTunes Match.

 

[olemrboston]

sjrogers; You are 100% correct by connecting an external HDD to your router. In my case I used my airport extreme, I can access the HDD on the router wherever I am. It acts just like a two way street. You can "write" and "read" to the HDD. The sticky at the top of this MBA forum section got me on the right track for setting it up.

 

[sjrogers]

sjrogers; You are 100% correct by connecting an external HDD to your router. In my case I used my airport extreme, I can access the HDD on the router wherever I am. It acts just like a two way street. You can "write" and "read" to the HDD. The sticky at the top of this MBA forum section got me on the right track for setting it up.

Great, thanks! I think I've made up my mind