Right…
Used to have a PC then switched to an inherited Macbook about a year ago. I backed up the iTunes library onto an external hard drive formatted for PC. Since then I have hardly used iTunes but now want to set up the Mac iTunes to recognise all the info in the external hard drive library. Since the library is quite large (lots of podcasts in it) and the Macbook is a few years old (2008/9?) I would quite like to keep it off the Macbook, or at least the majority of the stuff.
My wife now has an iPad and so it would also make sense to have some of the material available to share with her iTunes app.
Bearing in mind I am not overly good with computers, can anyone tell me how best to deal with this? I had been thinking iCloud but I would need to buy the latest version of OS X as mine is old enough that I can’t just upgrade. I would also apparently need to buy a bit more memory. I also thought about Dropbox but before I start messing around I thought I would ask for help! The other thing I’m not sure about is should I store files on a MAC formatted hard drive rather than PC formatted?

How do other people deal with this?
I also have a similar quandary with photos…

Many thanks in advance, Happy New Year to all!

Get a good quality NAS Drive, like a Western Digital MyBook, like this one:
http://www.portagadgets.com/uk/Western-Digital-My-Book-Live-Duo-Powered-LAN-6TB.html
Set it up as RAID 1*, so the drives mirror each other, and copy all your libraries onto it, then set iTunes up to see the music Library on the NAS. You can get an app for it that allows the iPad and the laptop to see the drive on the web, so you have your own personal Cloud storage. It’s what I’m getting very soon.
Oh, and set the MacBook up to do a regular backup at a set time, perhaps 00.30am, while its plugged in.
*I believe it’s RAID1, where each drive is a mirror image of the other, so if you have a drive failure, you can remove the duff drive and replace it with a new one, which will then mirror the other.
Oh, and you do the same with all other media like photos, ebooks, etc.
Just use TimeMachine, which will do the work for you; takes ages to start with, but worth it.

Sounds to me like you need/ want iTunes Match

http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/itunes-match/

You won’t need a nas just for music in this case and it will work across PC, mac and iPad. It’s working well here.

Running iTunes 11 on PC and mac here which is an improvement on previous iTunes versions (not hard really) and various iPhones and iPads running iOS 5 and 6

CZ, out of curiosity (Im not an IT professional), why are you recommending the TimeMachine backup in the context of your post? Surely if you have your disk set up RAID1, and use this as your primary data disk, this effectively takes care of any backup requirements.

Notes than in other contexts, this will not back up the system drive on the Mac, so Time Machine is still a good idea, but it is a different issue.

And yes, drive mirroring is RAID1. Other options are RAID0, where the two disks look like one big one, and JBOD, which rather amusingly stands for “Just A Bunch Of Disks” and is a simpler RAID mode where the two disks mount as two separate disks.

Raid is different to backup, raid creates hardware parity but doesn’t protect against data corruption.

I think time machine will require a separate partition on the raid array cz mentions if you choose that option.

Also, with that option how does the iTunes library format vary between windows and Mac OS? (In terms of the format of the raid array). Can you have the same library readable by both Mac OS and windows due to the two OS’ having different hdd format requirements?