After two days on this, I’m about ready to surrender. For whatever reason, Apple clearly does not want you running a media server from which one can stream and download on its iOS devices: it’s either the cloud—Apple’s cloud, natch—or streaming only. And of course it has to be iTunes for your streaming server or the store if you’ve got iTunes content, and of course implementing this on a separate computer is just tricky enough to be impractical, and only supports some media types some of the time, and doesn’t support books or audiobooks at all. It simply isn’t possible to remotely control a media library with all of the content in it, not even from an Apple computer. These features are clearly only intended for use by individuals on an informal basis, but simply can’t compete with rival media server solutions.
I have made a note to come back to this. Maybe in the future, my dream can come true. In the meantime, the old Mac Mini might come back to life as an OS X Server caching downloads, saving some of my bandwidth and making downloads from the store a bit more practical. There are also two other lessons to be learned from this: 1. DRM is evil. Really, really evil. Without DRM, iTunes could be thrown aside, and all content managed on the NAS directly. 2. Leave iTunes running. Your devices will sync more regularly, and you can stream your stuff. Just close the window to make it less distracting, while leaving the app open. Just like Mail. And a question: What about protected ePub books? If you opened one of those from your NAS, would you be able to read it in iBooks? Other protected files will seemingly not play if opened, including Audible. -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at [email protected] The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
