What's the optimal home network storage solution for music & photos

My mac disk is full with music (.wav from my CDs) and photos/videos. That will only increase so I am looking for a storing/network solution, rtaher than having an external drive permanently connected.
About music: I want to store music in high quality (wav not mp3) and stream it to the hi-fi, but also being able to synch playlists on the iPhone/iPad.
About photos/videos: I want to be able to select which one to access from all devices (iPad; iPhone, MacBook, AppleTV..) and those not edited yet from the macbook.
Any sugestion on where to start?

Patrick Hindman wrote:
Does anyone have any suggestions of what kind of hardware I should purchase to do this? Basically, I want a jam-up iTunes server that serves everything to each device (sorry, should have worded it this way sooner! . Maybe a MacMini server would do it? Or possibly just a Mac Mini or would Time Capsule do something like this?
i use an old G4 Mac Mini running 10.5 Leopard, and it's on 24/7
it runs in headless mode (ie no monitor) and i remotely administer it using remote desktop (or logmein if i'm out the house).
i have a 1TB WD Mybook hanging off it connected via Firewire and that stores all my itunes content.

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Message was edited by: varjak paw; changed to reflect the solution Alfred mentioned which I was unaware of.

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Option B: I delete the Logic stuff from my MBP, and re-install all programs and content on the Lacie.
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c.

Glad to see you chose "B"!
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• non-EXS sampler instruments and their samples
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*OPTION 1*
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Thing is, you want to keep a certain amount of your HD space free and clear (I think the going figure is 20%) and this is for system use. It's important. But as you add more sample libraries as well as projects, you'll start to eat up your system HD space. But at least your audio recordings will be contained on a separate drive and not impinge on your HD space, keeping as much of it as free and clear as possible.
Anyway, if you go with this scenario, when you want to archive a project to another external HD or DVDs, you have a few choices:
a) do a re-save of the project to a new folder so that you've consolidated all of the material into one place, or...
b) do a re-save of the project to a new folder, include all sampler instruments & samples and everything else except audio; keep the audio in its own folder (just as it exists on the LaCie) and copy that to your archiving medium separately.
There are probably other strategies as well, but those are just two suggestions...
*OPTION 2*
Have TWO external drives: one for audio recording only, and another one for all other "content" (apple loops, samples, maybe even EXS sampler instruments, depending on how big your EXS library is). Store your projects on your system HD. With this scenario you keep your system HD very clear for system use.
I guess the main gist of the above two suggestions is that you dedicate your audio drive for audio. The less extraneous stuff on your audio drive, the higher your track count will be.
OPTION3
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Hi
I dont use any additional little speakers if I want listen to the music.
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Hello!
I was wondering what would be a recommended hardware storage solution for collaboratively editing Final Cut Pro X Libraries. Our current process revolves us copying all the video footage onto a portable drive and copying it over to each others machine. This is a time consuming process and the process gets broken up if one of us isn't in the office. We are working only with 1080p (and less) footage and both machines are MacBook Pro's (both have Thunderbolt connections).
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Message was edited by:
shiva@india
Message was edited by:
shiva@india

tcwaters wrote:
....it really doesn't provide me with info as to what is the optimal size/resolution of images to import, ...
I did, I think:
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optimal for a project with maximum wide Ken Burns panning is 10.000x6.000 (=KB allows a max factor of 5x)
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optimal in terms of handy is a 2k res photo as jpg with 2-5Mbs (just a rule of thumb)
optimal in terms of processing in iMovie is 8bit compression, optimal in terms of quality is 10-12bit compression (no idea wether iM supports that)...
=> there is no SINGLE answer because there are several 'optimums' ....
the resolution should be close to your videos res.
if you add Ken Burns, multiply
doesn't care for dpi - that is for print only
avoid CMYK codecs, video is RGB only
iMovie supports alpha only in png
avoid too much compression BEFORE import - lots of MB is good. Lots of jpg to jpg to jpg generations is not good.
and so on, and so on........

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What's the optimal home network storage solution for music & photos

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