One Step Closer to the Digital Home

This week I finally got all the elements together to stream my digital music collection on my stereo system.

First I has to find a NAS hard disk with an iTunes server. Luck stroke in FNAC where I found something that looked the part: LaCie Home Edition 500 Gb. Check!

I'd been eyeing the second part of the installation for a while but at 500.- Sfr., the Logitech Squeezebox was just a little dear for my budget. Especially when one is in experimentation mode... So, after another trip to the FNAC (!), I came back with a Soundbridge device (by Roku Labs). Check!

Then started the battle, I plugged everything in and the bloody devices were not talking to each other. For that matter, the LaCie iTunes server was not talking much to anything wireless. I could access the hard disk volume wirelessly but not the iTunes server part... Back to the drawing board, or in this case, the support boards!

I visited the Roku, Axentra, LaCie support boards and read a lot of stuff until the wee hours to no avail. And then after a good (tho' short) night's sleep the solution dawned on me... What if it was my router that was the issue? Quite a few elements were pointing in that direction so I visited yet another support board; the Netgear one this time.

Once I had worked out which router version I have (finally found it on the sticker under my router - no way you can find that in the admin panel it seems), I ventured to download the latest firmware. And here something I have the biggest problem with on the Internet happened: I was redirected to a page in German and ONLY in bloody German (I will write about my frustration on this one in a separate entry soon, I can feel my blood boiling again). Trying to stay calm, I downloaded the new file, uploaded it to my router and voilà! my iTunes server and wireless streamer were on speaking terms!

So now on to the next stage: digitalizing my CD collection... I have been diligent in the last two years and every CD I bought in that period is on the server already. But when it comes to the 1,500 CDs bought beforehand, I am afraid I have only reached the letter B... At an average of 10 minutes per CD, I believe I have 250 solid hours of work before me. And then, the CDs still need to be imported into each iTunes library as there is no way to share one library with multiple users over a common network. And here the LaCie NAS drive was of no help whatsoever. So if you have multiple users with iPods, you still need multiple iTunes libraries... :-(

I don't consider myself an expert on this but I think I am definitely one step closer to being able to understanding and discuss this (at length)... Good or bad news? As long as I don't become a total Anorak, we're (you're) safe! ;-)