WTF Apple?!

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Berger_4_

God, I really feel kinda bad for making people troubleshoot my stuff for me. Here's the deal today. Bought an AirPort Extreme, and I hooked my external hard drive up to it so I can access my music through my computer anywhere in the house. Damn computer won't find the hard drive though. So what's the effing deal? Did I set up the base station wrong or what?

Have you enabled the disk in AirPort Utility?

I've got the exact same setup as you, but I had to share the disk and setup a user in AirPort Utility.

Here's a decent guide that walks through the steps: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1012

[llama64]

The best part about using OS X: being able to recover from an application crash without needing to REBOOT the system.

Funny thing is, my last major OS X crash (where everything locked up) was caused by a Virtual Machine image of WinXP.

/smarm

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by HotHotHeat

As I said, you cannot add music to your itunes library over a wireless XHD. It's way too demanding of a program to base it wirelessly.

Yes you can... And yes I do.

As for the topic at hand, while the router is Apple, the drive is not. If you want some magical wireless hard drive thing that took zero logic to use, then a Time Capsule is the way to go.

Since you're doing things the other way, by plugging a 3rd party drive into the back of a regular Apple router, you actually need set it up yourself. I've set up 6 of these same setups over the last year, and each one of them took under 3 minutes to complete, with only a few clicks.

It's not difficult to do. The AirDisk settings are right there in you AirPort preferences. Provided the disk is formatted properly, all you need to do is turn it on and set a password. If the disk isn't formatted properly, then that's hardly Apple's fault.

This "it just works" thing is usually reserved for 100% Apple solutions. A Time Capsule is setup for you and works like it should out of the box. A router with a 3rd party external hard drive does not.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by Berger_4_

Well before this degenerates into the usual pissing match, I think I got it. I have no idea how I did but I think it'll work...I just have to re-import all my music...so that's kind of a bitch being as I've got 40 gigs of the stuff to deal with.

The re-importing thing isn't relly that big of a deal. I have the same setup as you and my las reimport took 5 mins with 26GB of music. You're looking at 10mins tops.

Hardly the end of the world.

[Russic]

Originally Posted by Deegee

I downloaded/burned it for everyone and guess who couldn't get it to work on her computer.

Hey don't blame the mac because your coworker is a tool! She does sound annoying though ... that would drive me crazy.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

The re-importing thing isn't relly that big of a deal. I have the same setup as you and my las reimport took 5 mins with 26GB of music. You're looking at 10mins tops.

Hardly the end of the world.

I don't understand the benefit of having the music stored on the Airport disk though - any time you aren't in range of your own wifi, you won't have any of your media, unless you are just using the MBP as the conduit for syncing an iPod before heading out the door. But in that case, why not just plug the external drive into the MBP as needed and skip the whole wireless deal.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

I don't understand the benefit of having the music stored on the Airport disk though - any time you aren't in range of your own wifi, you won't have any of your media, unless you are just using the MBP as the conduit for syncing an iPod before heading out the door. But in that case, why not just plug the external drive into the MBP as needed and skip the whole wireless deal.

I just do it for my movies and TV shows that I've purchased from iTunes. It's too much to store on my laptop.

My music is stored locally though.

Library Files, Music, iPhone Apps, Album Covers -> Local
Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, Podcasts -> Time Capsule

Edit: The re-import I was referring to earlier was a while back, when I was using Apple Losseless (75GB) and my laptop drive was 120GB. I stored my music on an external drive connected to my AirPort back then.

Now I have a 500GB and I've since kicked my Lossless fetish.

[Berger_4_]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

The re-importing thing isn't relly that big of a deal. I have the same setup as you and my las reimport took 5 mins with 26GB of music. You're looking at 10mins tops.

Hardly the end of the world.

Yeah it wasn't a that big of a deal, but I've gotta delete every second song since I forgot to delete everything before I imported it haha. But not a huge thing...gonna take a bit to deal with but whatevs.

sclitheroe...I just use my iPod. It comes with me everywhere. I'd just hate to lose all the music I've accumulated over the years, so it just stays on the XHD at my place. And the XHD I've got isn't a portable one. It's a beast that plugs into the wall and all that. If I had a portable one, then hell yeah, I'd take it everywhere. But I'm poor and can't afford another HD haha.

[Deegee]

Originally Posted by Russic

Hey don't blame the mac because your coworker is a tool! She does sound annoying though ... that would drive me crazy.

People have the choice to buy Mac and it's their choice. People have the choice to PC, too.

I don't really understand why there are people who are so adament that there cannot possibly be two good computer products out there.

Sadly, at least in my experience, it seems usually the newbie computer users who buy a Mac are almost Nazi like in their following. It's always kind of nice when something doesn't "just work" for them and they have to spend two minutes to read the manual, so to speak.

Don't get me wrong, the people who own a PC and complain about endless virus because they install everything without being careful drive me sort of nuts, too.

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by llama64

The best part about using OS X: being able to recover from an application crash without needing to REBOOT the system.

That isn't something unique to OSX. Linux or Windows don't require reboots either when an app crashes.

[Russic]

Originally Posted by Deegee

People have the choice to buy Mac and it's their choice. People have the choice to PC, too.

I don't really understand why there are people who are so adament that there cannot possibly be two good computer products out there.

Sadly, at least in my experience, it seems usually the newbie computer users who buy a Mac are almost Nazi like in their following. It's always kind of nice when something doesn't "just work" for them and they have to spend two minutes to read the manual, so to speak.

Don't get me wrong, the people who own a PC and complain about endless virus because they install everything without being careful drive me sort of nuts, too.

I agree. Very tomato tomahto. Apple tries to make the purchase of a Mac something special for the consumer, so there seems to be a high occurrence rate of new adopters that get caught up in it all. It's unfortunate that in expressing their excitement people can sometimes come off like total ######bags.

[llama64]

Originally Posted by BlackEleven

That isn't something unique to OSX. Linux or Windows don't require reboots either when an app crashes.

The first thing any support guy will ask you to do if you call in is to reboot your system - this is a behavior derived from Windows.

If I suffer a driver problem or a massive application crash in Windows XP, it almost always results in a BSOD and a trip to the power button. OS X maintains a layer between application memory and system memory meaning I can usually kill off an offending process without affecting anything else.

Yes, in theory Windows works the same, but in practice to really fix it you do need to reboot the whole damn thing. Vista changed it's model, Windows 7 refined it - my hate is aimed entirely at XP and it's predecessors.

And come on... Linux doesn't have any apps to crash with anyways.

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by llama64

The first thing any support guy will ask you to do if you call in is to reboot your system - this is a behavior derived from Windows.

If I suffer a driver problem or a massive application crash in Windows XP, it almost always results in a BSOD and a trip to the power button. OS X maintains a layer between application memory and system memory meaning I can usually kill off an offending process without affecting anything else.

Yes, in theory Windows works the same, but in practice to really fix it you do need to reboot the whole damn thing. Vista changed it's model, Windows 7 refined it - my hate is aimed entirely at XP and it's predecessors.

And come on... Linux doesn't have any apps to crash with anyways.

Linux has apps now?

[BlackEleven]

Originally Posted by llama64

The first thing any support guy will ask you to do if you call in is to reboot your system - this is a behavior derived from Windows.

If I suffer a driver problem or a massive application crash in Windows XP, it almost always results in a BSOD and a trip to the power button. OS X maintains a layer between application memory and system memory meaning I can usually kill off an offending process without affecting anything else.

Yes, in theory Windows works the same, but in practice to really fix it you do need to reboot the whole damn thing. Vista changed it's model, Windows 7 refined it - my hate is aimed entirely at XP and it's predecessors.

And come on... Linux doesn't have any apps to crash with anyways.

Well, true on the support guy, but I don't think the O/S should be blamed because support guys don't actually know how to fix the problem and just hopes to $deity that a reboot will fix it.

Drivers, true as well. But that's the tradeoff when you open your O/S to all sorts of third parties. You get a wide variety of hardware support but you put some of the stability of your O/S into the hands of people that may or may not know what their doing. As for applications, I work with Windows very seldom, but I can't recall an app crashing so badly that I wasn't able to kill it with a simple visit to the task manager.

As for Linux, there's plenty of apps out there (and the vast majority are free). For a living I write code on all three major O/Ses (linux, mac, win), and Linux is hands down my preferred choice, and what I use for my own personal use at home. I don't have any problems finding apps to do what I want. I do keep a Windows machine around for the occasional gaming, but other than that, it's all linux for me.

In general, all the O/Ses have advanatges and associated trade-offs and its a matter of picking what works best for you. People that can't understand why the rest of the world doesn't use the same O/S as them are just buying into the image/marketing, hook, line and sinker.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by BlackEleven

Well, true on the support guy, but I don't think the O/S should be blamed because support guys don't actually know how to fix the problem and just hopes to $deity that a reboot will fix it.

Not entirely - the troubleshooting reboot gets everyone back to the same page on what apps are open, allows the user and the tech to walk through the steps required to reproduce the problem, etc.

Unless its a 3am support call, then yeah, you are just blindly hoping it fixes the issue so you can get back to sleep.