For the last few months I was interested in creating a central iTunes library so my family at home didn’t need to rely on the one computer that contained all of our music.  Moving all of our music and corresponding image art and ratings to our existing Synology file server on our home network would be the best solution for us – it would be centralized, have more than enough space to grow, and have the disk redundancy my laptop lacked.  This solution of centrally locating the library would allow any PC or Mac on our home LAN running iTunes to connect to it and manage it seamlessly as if it were local to the computer.

The one small downside with this configuration is that the laptop would no longer have music stored on it, so that library would be inaccessible outside of my home network, but thats why we have iPhones and iPads.  Anyway, when our laptop containing all 250GB of music recently ran out of space it was the push I needed to figure out exactly how one relocates an entire iTunes library.  The following is a step-by-step walkthrough of what I did to successfully make this all happen.

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I’ve been offline on my blog for a couple of months given that I have taken on a new position at my company, as the Product Manager of a very sexy and successful multimedia platform.  Since joining a team of very sharp and bright folks, the work has been non-stop.  In less than two weeks I wrote over thirty user stories and probably double that many wireframes.  Agile and so organized, our developers are spinning out new requests into our QA environment every few days.  And, I’ve moved to a nice view overlooking Times Square, so I’ve got going for me, which is nice.

Unfortunately, my job has indirect association with our own Online Video Platform in-house, so I have stopped reviewing third-party OVPs for the time being.  It was an important realization when some big OVP providers recently contacted me for help on how different OVPs compare.  Instead, I’ve been pouring everything I’ve got into the next version of our platform, which is due at the beginning of December.  It is sure to wow our customers and its only getting better.

Since getting my iPhone I’ve enjoyed creating short clips and posting them on my Facebook account, but never really did any editing on the device.  So, I blew some cash in the App Store to try out video editing apps for the iPhone and post my findings here.  Like many, if not most App Store junkies, I download based on positive feedback (no fewer than 3 stars), and secondly, on the screenshots – UI design is very important to me.

With all that in mind, I downloaded five apps that are all very slick and easy to use.  I have categorized these five based on the level of editing and features you may be interested in: Simple (few features, speedy rendering), Intermediate (additional features but not what I would call feature-rich), and Advanced (deep mobile editing, feature rich, offers more tools than the previous two categories).
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