Regular readers will remember perhaps that I bought an Apple AirPort Extreme because I could attach a (in fact several via a hub at least theoretically) USB drive to it and then be able to access files on the USB drive wirelessly from the two portables I have (an Acer running Vista and a MacBook running OS X Tiger).

With this I mainly hoped to finally acheive the aim of having all my non-Classical music available on call via a portable without needing to have the portable physically near to the large USB drive I had them on.

It's working but there are a few problems.

The first is that most of my music files are .wma. This means that while I can play them from the MacBook, ITunes will not catalogue them so I can only play them one track at a time rather than per album or per artist.

The Acer has no such problems. Once they are added to the Media Viewer Library, all the usual functions are available there (and I suppose as it's Vista Ultimate in Media Center). The problem here was that in order to add 3000 tracks to the Library I had to click over 3000 times on different files on that same USB hard disk.

The reason seems to be that in order to atttach it to that Apple device, the USB disk needs to be Mac-formatted. Certainly it has to be Mac-formatted if I intend to add a Parallels VM to it.

This means that Vista doesn't recognize the drive as a normal drive but as a drive of form \\xxxxxxx\xxx and this in turn seems to mean that the automatic finding of media files doesn't work properly. What happens is that it works until it finds a file it needs to add and then it stops. I discovered that by clicking *any* file on that disk and then another each time increases the count of files found by (usually) 2. So an awful lot of clicks later and with by no means all my CDs yet on that disk (and when I now put them on it they are .mp3 to allow the MacBook to access them from within ITunes), I now have a perfectly working Windows Viewer with wireless access to my "cheapskate's" Media Server.

There's still a lot of space on that disk so for now I don't need to find a good enough hub to add another USB disk. (But as I have several possibles, no doubt I'll be trying that sooner rather than later.)