iTunes Library Lock and disk latency(?)

[duprea]

I worked out moving my iTunes library to an external hard drive attached to airport extreme thanks to Ben (a tech here at Macosx). Each of my three machines (two macbooks and an iMac) can see the library. And they can play it. Two questions:

1. If I have iTunes open and attached to the library on the hard drive from any one machine, no other machine can get to it. The library is reported to be locked for exclusive use. I don't get any option for read only. Is there a preference setting somewhere that I'm missing? Is this the hard drive? What?

2. When the disk hasn't been accessed for a while it takes time to spin up. Is there a disk setting that will simply keep it spinning? Is that the problem? It can take as long as ten or fifteen seconds to start a movie, perhaps five to ten seconds to start a song. It's a DiskGo Edge 400 gig. Is there a better device for this purpose?

Thanks in advance.

 

[arri]

It wouldn't surprise me if the iTunes library just wasn't designed to be accessed by multiple instances of iTunes at once. It would also actually makes sense..

The read-online option would be simpy sharing the library from the 'main' machine.

You can prevent the harddisk from spinning down in the System Prefs. It's under Energy Settings.

And in case you didn't know it yet, for questions like "Where can i configure option X", System Prefs has a super usefull spotlight-based(?) search feature.

it actually looks like a spotlight..

btw, you would expect the Energy Settings - prefpane to be in the search-results when performing the same search in spotlight from the menubar.. but strangly enough it isn't. (at least on my machine - 10.4.11)