SE51 > /dev/null > 2007 > September > 16

So today I had the very strange idea to clean up my room, which I incidentally did after having the thought. As I was cleaning up, I was thinking about the next cool thing I could do for my room in terms of adding additional geek value.

I came up with the idea to hook up the old flat screen LCD TV to my MacBook, then let music run on it with full screen Cover Flow. It looks cooler than Front Row and it is controllable with the Apple Remote. So I thought I’d do that.

Problem: Shared Music doesn’t do Cover Flow, only plain lists.

Solution: Created the below workaround to make all accessible for Macs and PCs.

I knew that iTunes somehow accesses the music and its artwork, so I checked the folder where the music is stored. Since access to user folders on a Mac is pretty limited, I moved the entire collection (weighing 22 GB) into the Shared folder located at the root level, /Shared. This folder is practically free of any restrictions.

Check in iTunes, everything empty. That’s good. I then pointed iTunes to the new location for my music, which is now in the Shared folder. Quit iTunes. That alone wasn’t good enough, so I created aliases for Album Artwork, iTunes Music and iTunes Music Library.xml in my own Music folder.

Check number 2 in iTunes, music shows up, everything there, all playlists, all everything. Pretty nice.

Then on the MacBook, I mounted the entire iMac as a Volume, then pointed iTunes to the same location for music on the shared drive, quit iTunes.

So everything is set up correctly, the only thing - and this is very important if you don’t want to run into conflicts with every iTunes installed on every machine - you have to do, is to leave a real iTunes Library file in each iTunes folder for each user. Do NOT create links or aliases - otherwise when one iTunes plays and you want to open your own, iTunes will tell you that your Library is locked!

I created aliases for everything, but left a real iTunes Library in each music folder, so that my iTunes on my iMac will not complain when the MacBook is accessing music on the iMac.

This procedure should work for Mac and PCs equally. Let me know when you try it out.

Cover Flow on my MacBook, on which not a single song is stored:

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UPDATE:

To make my life easier, I have created a little Apple Script and saved it as application, which runs at start up.

These things are done, in this order:

- Connect to the the place where the music is
- Open iTunes
- Set it to full screen
- Start playing

tell application “Finder” to mount volume “afp://User Name:Password@IP.Adress/Name Of the Volume where music is”

tell application “iTunes” to run

tell application “System Events”
tell application “iTunes” to activate
keystroke “f” using {command down}
end tell

tell application “System Events”
tell application “iTunes” to play
end tell