Well, I built a headless Blue & White iTunes (music) server.

[deckeda]

This was really more of a "proof of concept" project. Wanted something I could leave on almost 24/7 and this is what I had to work with.

Client Macs see it in their "SHARED" section of their own iTunes and stream to AirTunes, typically. Browsing the library and playing songs is very responsive once the client Mac gets the song list built.

It's controlled by the other Macs' Screen Sharing if necessary. I use this on the client Macs too: http://www.klieme.com/ScreenSharingMenulet.html

300Ghz/512MB CPU, which is plenty.
Tiger, with all updates
iTunes 9.02

I only put a fraction of our music on it-I don't have real storage for it and don't dare actually spending money on the thing. But since our current library is all on external FW drives anyway I can move it over (I swapped-in a Rev. 2 mobo I had laying around.)

Anything I could do to tweak the OS? Anything to disable under the hood that might make it a little leaner and meaner? It didn't get the extra fonts or printer drivers installed.

[M A V I C]

I'd make sure you have backups of all your music. I've been using iTunes like this for years, works very well. I only wish I could edit playlists on the server from another computer with iTunes.... basically the same as if the library was local.

[Wailer]

How many watts does that consume?

If it uses more than 250 watts and you're going to run it continuously, a used 20 watt g4 mini ($200 or so) will pay for itself within a year. At least it would here where I pay $0.135 per kWH.

[deckeda]

Conceptually, what I did isn't different from the mini we've been using for this for the last several years but it's nice to have and independent music source. The B&W is a stop-gap solution, but one that works better than I thought it would.

[C(-)ris]

I've got something similar going on a Mac Mini....well, same thing and a whole lot more.

I have a 3TB Promise RAID running RAID 5 attached via eSATA to a Mac Mini. That stores all my music, movies, pictures, etc. Running 10.6 server. All the music is added into iTunes, like yours, and shared out on the network. The AppleTV is joined up to it as well so that it can play all the movies and TV shows. AirTunes works great streaming to the Apple TV.

I use Remote Desktop to get to it, but screen sharing works just as well. The Mac Mini also has a volume set as a Time Machine share and I back up all my other Macs to the external drive.

I need to get the Kill A Watt on it to see how much power it consumes.

[Black]

The biggest improvement would be via maxing the RAM to 1 GB.
A newer hard drive, even if not significantly larger, would be next.
I concur that lack of playlist access in iTunes sharing, well, sucks.

[C(-)ris]

I would think you could find a G4 tower for free on Craigslist in your area. Not sure if that would help on the power front, but it would be a nice improvement. Or perhaps someone has a G4 ZIF sitting around for you.

[deckeda]

I know this thing sounds like it must be seriously hobbled, but for streaming music files it's just as good as when we were using our Intel mini. No upgrades just for more horsepower here.

[kj4btkljv]

How do you have the hard drives hooked up in there, via the on-board ATA bus, or drop in PCI card?

I'm almost positive there's a data corruption problem with the B&W G3 towers, maybe anything slower than 400MHz. You'd have to Google for it. Maybe it was only while running under OS9, I can't remember. I've got a B&W sitting in a back storage room, because I feared using it due to this issue.

Jeff

[btfc]

"I'm almost positive there's a data corruption problem with the B&W G3 towers"

Some, not all, depends on rev. #.