Chris

Thanks again for your efforts in tracking this little gem of an app down!
I've just tested it...what a time and hastle saver...it's deceptively simple, yet SOOO useful...
The cumbersome steps required to mount my NAS drive was THE hitch I was having in moving my music library.
As you say, now with this little app the NAS mounts automatically before itunes everytime!
No more explanation marks, no more rebuilding libraries etc etc..what an app Chris!

Thoroughly recommended!

AB

Chris,

It looks like this would be typically most helpful with "canned" NAS units like the Drobo, etc., but would this also be something that would be useful for someone (like me) whose hard drive is attached to an Airport Extreme? Or, in your experience, does the Airport Extreme not have these connection issues? I'm setting up my gear and wondered if this is something I should install from the get go. Thanks

TheOtherTim

Sorry to have to ask and again reveal my almost complete ignorance regarding computer lingo ,but what exactly is a NAS drive?
I have been thinking of getting a firewire 800 La Cie Rugged 250 G portable disk for my music storage when I travel next time.
Could I store and play files directly into i-Tunes from something like that?
Will I need to install iTunes on it and if so how?
Chrille

Thanks Chris all clear now,
thanks to your quick responses ,I´m learning new things almost everyday, and have actually managed to get ok sound from my mac simply by setting 24/96 in audio midi and connecting a headphone amp and my Sennheisers .
The sound I get on the testfiles from 2L and the Czech Radio free Downloads isn´t as good as my SACDs.
But good enough to make me listen to some music over headphones while working on my images in Photoshop.
But I have occasionally noticed dropouts.
What is the reason for those?
The internal soundcard in the mac or something else?
As a first step on my next long phototrip I will probably get the Proton if it is released soon .
Otherwise I´ll get the Apogee Duet and store my music on a La Cie Rugged.
All the best Chrille

Thanks for the hints. I tried fooling around with Automator, but no joy. My system is a bit different: iMac Intel Core Duo, 10.4.11, LaCie NAS connected through a Linksys wireless router to the Airport wireless on the Mac, and the iTunes library is on a share on the NAS server with keychain-stored authentication. I can connect on startup fine with the share in the user account startup list, but the connection will vanish after awhile, and I typically won't notice until I start iTunes. Quitting iTunes, connecting manually, and restarting iTunes works fine, but is of course an annoyance. I was looking to test your idea as a way to create a "stickier" connection. So, what is different about connecting via Go/Connect to server vs. through the Finder window? Any other ideas about where to go with this?

Yes I did, and oops, I meant to post to that article instead of this one originally. My bad. I've been fiddling with the Automator script to try to get it to work, more to learn about Automator than anything. When I connect to my NAS, I have to explicitly select a share to connect to. I forget now whether this is mandatory with the LaCie drive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, there's a user name and password associated with that action which seems to be taken care of during the startup process through the Keychain facility. One thing I don't understand is the difference between connecting through the Finder panes (select Network, than the NAS item, then connect to the share) and Go/Connect to server. I had read something somewhere that indicated one method is preferable to the other when setting this up as a startup item, but no reason was given why. Both seem to get me to the same place when done manually.

Where I worked in a previous life, I was used to being connected to a number of shares on the company network and having those connections persist, except for genuine system failure issues. What's bugging me here is that an idle connection to the share on my NAS will time out after a period of time (a few hours, maybe) and I'll have to reconnect manually. This doesn't seem to happen if I'm using it periodically (like when listening to iTunes). I'm thinking I should write some kind of a ping app that periodically refreshes the connection in the background. I'm wondering if anyone out there has seen and dealt successfully with this behavior.

Thanx again for your patience with a noob. We could move this discussion over to the proper article if you like.

My setup is slightly different in that my music files are on an XP PC that is also used for backups and as a Digital video recorder. In order to save on my electricity bills I have set the PC to go into S3 sleep when inactive. This is well worth doing; using a plug-in power monitor I monitored the PC's power usage for a month to obtain real world figures. If the PC was left on 24/7 it would cost me around £50/year in electricity, but using S3 sleep it is only costing me £4/year. Anyway to the point, to get the PC to wake when required I set it to only respond to a "Magic Packet" otherwise it would be wakeing all the time on general network traffic. I then obtained a wake on LAN utility for the Mac Book, which was fine but it required me to:

Boot the Mac
Manually send a Magic packet
Wait for the PC to wake
Open a finder window
Connect the network drive
Start iTunes
Start signal (iTunes remote control software)

This was a bit of rigmarole just to listen to music, so with a bit of research and experimentation I have managed to write a script to automate the task. The script is as follows

Tell application "WakeOnLan"
Wakeup "192.168.0.4"
end tell

delay 25

tell application "WakeOnLan"
quit
end tell

delay 10

tell application "Finder"
mount volume "smb://username:password@severname/sharename"
end tell

tell application "Signal"
activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
set visible of process "Signal" to false
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
activate
end tell

A couple of things to note, as the PC takes time to wake a delay is required, originally I had a single delay after "WakeOnLan" had quit, but occasionally this application did not like being shut down so promptly after being started, so I moved a portion of the delay to this point in the script. When mounting the volume I included the username and password for the share, do not ask me why but this seemed to be more reliable than saving these credentials in the keychain. I have saved the script as an application and set it to run at boot.

I mentioned earlier that I had monitored the PC's power useage, well I have done the same with my Mac, router, cable modem, wireless router, gigabit switch and airport express's. If anyone is interested I will post my findings in the "general" section.

Paul

Works great and iTunes is running well with my NAS. I think I pushed it too far having iTunes open on login, which didn't work, but opening it once the computer has fully booted is not a huge deal.

Thanks Chris.