If you are interested in getting thousands of mp3-files on your computer using only 128 Kb of ROM, read on! Yesterday I made my hands dirty and with Jan’s help upgraded two 6 Gb colored iMacs (a blue and a pink one) to potential servers for our home-network having a 80 Gb resp. a 120 Gb hard disk. If you do the installation yourself such an upgrade costs you roughly 1 Euro/Gigabyte which seems to me like a good investment. Clearly, you need to know how to do this and be less hardware-phobic than I am. Fortunately, the first problem is easily solved. There is plenty of good advice on the net : for the colored iMacs we used the upgrade an iMac-page of MacWorld. For possible later use, there is also a page for replacing the hard disk in an old iBook (which seems already more challenging) and in a flat screen iMac (which seems to be impossible without proper tools). Anyway, we followed the page and in no time replaced the hard disks (along the way we made all possible mistakes like not connecting the new hard disk and then being surprised that the Disk Utility cannot find it or not putting back the RAM-chips and panicking when the normal start-up chime was replaced by an aggressive beep). An unexpected pleasant surprise was that the blue iMac, which I thought to be dead, revived when we replaced the hard disk.

Back home, I dumped a good part of our CD-collection on the blue iMac (1440 songs, good for 4.3 days of music and taking up 7.11 Gb of the vast 120 Gb hard disk) to test the iTunes Central hack explained by Alan Graham in his six great tips for homemade dot mac servers. Would I manage to get the entire collection on my old iBook which had only (after installing all this WarWalking-software) 800 Mb of free disk space? Here is what I did :

1. On the iBook (or any machine you want to play this trick on) go to your Home/Music/iTunes-folder and drag the two files and one directory it contains to the Trash. Do the same for the two files com.apple.iTunes.eq.plist and com.apple.iTunes.plist which are in the Home/Library/Preferences-folder.

2. On the iBook, use the Finder/Network-icon to connect to the server (iMacServer in my case) and browse to the iTunes-folder where you placed all the music (still, on the iBook in the Finder-window opened when you connect to iMacServer). Make an Alias of the two files and the directory in it (click on one of them once, go to the File-submenu of the Finder and choose Make Alias) which results in three new entries in the iTunes directory : iTunes 4 Music Library alias, iTunes 4 Music Library.xml alias and iTunes 4 Music Library alias. Drag these 3 aliases to the Home/Music/iTunes-folder on the iBook and rename them by removing the alias-addendum.

3. In the Finder-window on the iBook corresponding to the iMacServer browse to the Home/Library/Preferences-folder and drag the two files com.apple.iTunes.eq.plist and com.apple.iTunes.plist to the Home/Library/Preferences-folder of the iBook. Launch iTunes and it will give you access to the whole iTunes-collection of iMacServer! In all, the three aliases and the 2 copied files take up 128 Kb…

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Posted in mac
Written on Thu, 22 January 2004 at 4:19 pm
Tags: apple, mac, warwalking
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