Re: Audiotron & NAS (LinkStation)

Regarding AudioTron and NAS, I looked at both the Linksys NSLU2 and the
Buffalo LinkStation.  Both seemed hackable enough, but I decided on the
LinkStation since it was fully self-contained and thus smaller and
lower total power consumption.

I bought the 160GB LinkStation, and it happily serves up music to the
AudioTron and (as of earlier today) is also now a daap server, meaning
it serves music just like iTunes to various Macs and PCs within the
house.  So, all of the music is in one place, but I no longer need a
desktop computer to be on to serve music to the other computers running
iTunes.

Granted, the iTunes (mt-daapd) server is not out-of-the-box
functionality, but if you don't mind hacking around in Linux a bit, I
have to say it was pretty straight-forward to get it up and running.
Now I have a small, quiet, and low-power (<17W) server on my network
which spins up when someone wants to play music, and otherwise just
hangs out waiting for someone to access it.  It is accessible from both
Macs and PCs, and also has an ftp server -- useful since that makes it
a great network store for automated Retrospect Express (the cheap
version of Retrospect) backups.

If anyone decides to pursue this path, there's a LinkStation group on
Yahoo, and in the files area up there are instructions on how to gain
root access and install the iTunes server or SlimServer software.
--Steve