I've pushed across my whole music collection to my Buffalo Linkstation NAS recently. This is the entire iTunes folder including artwork, music, library.xml, the whole kaboodle... (I have iTunes in consolidation mode to keep everything in one place).
Now this is done, I hold down alt and click iTunes, then select the iTunes folder on the NAS (Choosing the library folder I copied across) and am now able to access everything.
However... It is REALLY REALLY slow, iTunes takes ages to load and its hard to even change an ID3 tag... Music seems to play fine though (once its playing).
I get the impression that the extreme slowness is from iTunes's library xml file being accessed a lot in order to update and read/write information. My library file is around 80mb, my collection is about 300gb to 500gb approx. I know it iTunes that is the problem since I'm connected via ethernet to the NAS (not wireless).
So I'm potentially looking for a way to keep the library file on my local computer and then make sure my music files (and playlists) are kept remotely on the NAS.
Is this possible?
Please note, I need to be able to use this for syncing with my iPhone, iPod etc (If that makes any difference to a solution/suggestion made)