The Digital Hub Theory
25 May 2010 -
Yeah, I've written about this before, and problem I seem to run into is that there isn't a good satisfying solution for it. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. First, the problem:
I want a way to store all my personal media such as videos, music and photos so that it is accessible and editable from a given set of devices and locations
Right, clear enough for you? Well, it seems that this is harder to achieve than I imagined when Steve Jobs started talking about the Digital Hub almost ten years ago, where he envisioned that the Mac would be the central device to manage all the media and information from all the gadgets in your life.
Well, needless to say, the iLife suite very much lived up to this requirement and has since then. But the problem is that the Mac is no longer the central device for your computing needs. In 2001, the Mac was the place where you imported, edited and enjoyed the media that you imported or synced to a multitude of "dumb" devices. This was totally logical at the time, but that time has long since passed.
The general problem I've always had with this "Digital Hub" scenario is that it presupposes that the hub is one single device, meaning that there is one Mac where all my music, all my photos and all my movies are kept. While this may be true for a lot of people, it's not for me. And it's just not a matter of where the information is kept, but also how I want to manage it. I keep finding myself at work wanting to edit a playlist in iTunes because I know that when I get home, I'll forget it or I won't have time to do it. But I can't, since the computer that is my "Digital Hub" is at home (it isn't, but more on that in a while).
When laptops became commonplace, and when the storage on laptops became large enough, moving the Digital Hub to my laptop was the logical choice. But even with a 500GB hard drive, I can't fit all my movies on it, so most of them are kept on my Mac Pro server at home (with a Drobo), which is outside the Digital Hub horizon.
So, this is pretty much my setup now. I have all my music (about 60GB worth) and all my photos (over 20k photos) on my Macbook Pro and this is my Digital Hub. All the blue lines are devices that I sync or import from to my laptop. This is a great setup since I have all my media with me, and I can sit in the sofa at home and edit home moives (which I never do, but I can). The red line going from iTunes to my Mac Pro at work is the built in sharing function in iTunes that shows my laptop in iTunes on my Mac Pro and I can listen to music (but not edit playlists and such).
The problem with this is of course that I need to have my laptop with me all the time. This wasn't a problem a couple of months ago but with the new iPad, I'd really like to cut down on the weight of my bag.
So this is a possible solution. All media is kept on my home server, which has a Drobo disk raid, so there is enough space to go around. I can then mount the hard drive of my home server on my work Mac and thus create an alias to the iTunes folder there, so when opening iTunes at work, it will work (albeit slower) with the iTunes library as if it were local. I can sync my iPad and my iPhone as much as I like at home and at work and I can edit playlists, purchase music and applications on my work mac.
Home Sharing?
But there's this new functionality in iTunes 9 that's called Home Sharing, that basically let's you sync libraries between computers using the same iTunes account. This could probably be a really neat solution, given that my solution above requires me to shut down iTunes on the server if I am to open it on my Mac. The question then is wether I can sync my iPhone to both computers, or if it'll say that it's tied to another iTunes. I guess trial and error will let me know. I'll get back to you about it.
Mer i Webblog
