Having recently acquired an iPad4, the one thing I'm having a few niggling issues with is streaming music. Not the technicalities, which are already sorted, but the finer details.

I also have an Onkyo Home Cinema controller, and got the excellent app to control that from the iPad. Only one problem, there is no facility to create playlists. So unless I want to play one ong at a time, I have to use read created playlists, and as far as I can tell, that means using the dreaded iTunes.

What I want to do, is have iTunes scan a library of music on my NAS drive (which tells me it has required support), and stream music from there including playlists, without actually copying anything to the iPad itself.

Has anyone done this?

Have you had a look at MediaMonkey, it is very configurable and would probably do what you want without the use of itunes.
It sits nicely in the background, scans new content and playlists and auto playlist are well catered for.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/

I use Media Monkey all the time on my PC. There is no Mac version, as far as I am aware. But will definitely give it another look to see if it can offer the kind of functionality I need.

Just on the slim chance that anyone else looks this thread up, I've cracked it!

Turns out that the aforementioned Onkyo controller app (available for iPad with something similar if less elegant for Android), WILL pick up and play Playlists made in MediaMonkey.

So, iTunes not required.