I have a client that wants to use their Apple laptop to send music to the system that we set up.
I've seen a laptop running itunes stream wirelessly to systems using a airport express, but I don't have any idea if you can add a networked hard drive to the system. And is it going to be easy to use?
Should I just stay away?

tvisser is pretty hip when it comes to Mac oriented stuff...

Mark,
Email these guys with you question [email protected] they are the bomb when it comes to Mac stuff. I have heard them answer this question before but I ignored it because it was Mac related.

Thanks guys. I've tried surfing through the mac forums but have not found the answer yet.

If they download music off of ITunes it cannot be tranferred to a hard drive system directly due to the copywrite protection. A work around is to rip it to a CD and then load that onto the hard drive system. Also most hard drive systems will play MP3, some Flac, but none that I know of are compatable with the mac MP4a format which is the default music format for appples. I had to take a clients whole music collection from their Apple and run every album through a program to convert from MP4a to MP3 for an Escient once, took a couple of days to do.

The main source will be their ripped cds

It's do-able, but prone to problems. You can create an alias to the network share that holds the mp3's, then tell iTunes to use the alias as the iTunes library. You might have to rename the alias to something that doesn't include "alias" in the name (like "music", instead of "music alias").

The problems arise when the shared folder is unavailable. iTunes would probably lock up and you'd be stuck looking at a little spinning beach ball.

Mark,
This sound ecactly like the answer I heard on that radio show except they talked about a software fix and something about that alias stuff.

What is the networked hard drive going to be used for? It's pretty easy to stream the music to another device. The advantage of the Airport Express is going to be that you can listen to the iTunes Purchased music as well. Where as something like a Roku Soundbridge will not let you do that.
There's a program out there that will let you stream ANY audio from your computer to (your playback device here) wirelessly too so you can listen to DVD or Internet content as well.

Upon further contemplation... are you looking to store the music on the Network Drive but play it back via the laptop? That does get a little tricky, but it's definitely do-able!
The easiest thing to do would be to hook up a Mac Mini (or even a used 1st gen iMac - careful that it has Firewire or USB2 though!) to "Share" the music to the Laptop. It will show up in iTunes as "Mac Mini's Shared Music". At that point though, it would just be easier to throw the drive AND the Mac Mini near the equipment and hook it up directly and use Front Row to control the playback. (IR remote included to boot!)

I see where installtech is heading. You're saying to store ALL of the music on the Hard Drive. You're probably right. I can verify this later tonight as my iTunes drive is not the same as my start up disk so I can just turn it off and see what iTunes thinks about that! I'm thinking it might just say "There is no iTunes Folder associated with this Library, would you like to create one?" If you click on yes, then you just did all that work for nothing since it would no longer know to look for that Network Drive.

What exactly are you trying to do?

I'm typing right now on a Macbook pro, and have music collections on a couple of ibooks and an iMac also, but all 120 gigs of my music is on a external drive. I use airport express to the dist audio system and stream off the external, on which ever computer it may be on. My external drive is named iItunes. Its late and I'm lost, but let me know if you need any help.

I've set up an airport express for a client w/a Russound multizone system, and it was relatively painless to set up & install - his laptop connects to the airport xpress via the wired network (we've disabled the xpress' wifi capability) and then the xpress' admin utility adds a "destination" parameter to the laptop's iTunes client.

The client accepted that there was no control of the "music server" (other than vol +/-), as this is supposedly just a temporary solution - however, I will say that the system is prone to issues. Several times now the iTunes client has "lost" the connection to the xpress (that is, the "destination" parameter I speak of disappeared), requiring the admin utility to be run.

Bottom line - easy to do, but make sure you indicate a disclaimer of limited/no support, as this option is *not* ready for primetime, imho.