A Touch a Buffalo and a Nano

[paltomare]

Been using my faithful SB1-original version at home for many years now waitng for the Touch to come along.

I have three questions hopefully someone can answer.

First, can the Touch play and display songs directly from an Ipod (mass storage mode) connected to the Touch's USB port? I suspect the answer is yes but have not seen this discussed yet.
Second, can the Touch play and display songs from a NAS (Buffalo drive) connected through a switch to its ethernet port without running SC on a PC? The advantage to this is that I could burn songs to the Buffalo and mirror the Buffalo with a PC but not need the PC to play the songs.
Third, will we still need to manually switch between SC and SN or will the Touch handle playing internet streams and local music more seamlessly.
Thanks,
Paul

[JohnSwenson]

If the iPod looks like a USB disk then TinySC should be able to work with it.

Currently TinySC will only take files on something that looks like a disk connected to the USB port or an SD card.

To use a NAS you would have to mount the NAS (which can be done using linux commands, there is no GUI for it) and tell TinySC to look at that mount point for data. Again you can do this with linux commands but there is no GUI.

I heard one developer say this was on purpose, they would rather you run the server on the NAS box, the concern was that a full scan over a wireless network would take a very long time for a large library.

John S.

[paltomare]

Thanks John. I am not familiar with Linux commands so mounting the NAS sounds like more trouble than it's worth but this leads me to another question. If I attach an external USB drive to the Touch would that drive be seen on my network by my computer? If yes, I could drag and drop music to the drive and backup the drive that way.

[andynormancx]

The iPod Touch/iPhone cannot be accessed as a mass storage device, so the SB Touch won't be able to access the music on it.

In theory someone could put together some code to give the SB Touch access to the music on the iPod Touch, but it won't work out of the box.

Some other iPods can be accessed as mass storage devices.

[aubuti]

Thanks John. I am not familiar with Linux commands so mounting the NAS sounds like more trouble than it's worth but this leads me to another question. If I attach an external USB drive to the Touch would that drive be seen on my network by my computer? If yes, I could drag and drop music to the drive and backup the drive that way.
Yes. Just like your NAS, the Touch runs a Samba server, which is a way of sharing drives across a network.

[paltomare]

Great, thanks everyone, I'm looking forward to getting a couple of Touch's.