Sunday, June 17, 2007

Mac Media Center


I really like the Mac Mini and FrontRow as a way to play media.  The interface is great.  The one part of this solution that I am getting frustrated with is how to copy tracks to it.  Since FrontRow uses iTunes to play audio tracks, they need to be copied to the iTunes library.


I wrote this AppleScript to copy newly added tracks to the hard drive on the Mac mini and then add them to the iTunes library.  This works fine, if you want to keep the content on the computer itself.  I now want to keep my content on my Network Attached Storage. 


Copying content to the NAS works perfectly for video content, as FrontRow will make videos available that are on a remove file system, when you add an alias to the remote directory on the local hard drive.  This doesn't work for audio, as you not only want to make the content playable, but you want to have it indexed by the meta data.





I want to come up with a solution that would allow me to just mount either the Mac mini or the NAS and just copy the tracks.  I want the interface to automatically see the new tracks.


I know that SlimServer and Jinzora will do this, but these jukebox software packages don't have a good UI for the TV.  Maybe MediaCentral will do what I want.

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