Itunes multiple user sharing

[bezva]

Hey Everyone, my first post, and already a question ) I am trying to figure out how to share my music to multiple users on one machine. I don't want each user to have their own music folder and take up an abundance of space. Is there a solution that works for this. I am aware of the sharing component, but that doesn't work with allowing to people to add music to the library as different users.

Thanks for looking.

 

[Kwyjibo]

i'm havign a similar problem but its a bit more advanced than that.. simple solution for you is to change the location where it saves the itunes folder its in the advanced control panel of itunes prefs...


the tricky part is figuring out a way to keep the song you add on one account or in one OS to add in another OS

 

[junior]

Why don't you create a partition just for music files and set itunes in all accounts to use the library within that partition, or of course there's always the option of an external harddrive.

 

[ColoJohnBoy]

Create a folder in an area common to all the computer's users - I would suggest the Applications folder - and put all your music in there. Then open iTunes under each account, go to iTunes>Preferences>Advanced and change the iTunes Music Folder Location on each account to the same folder. That way everybody is reading/writing to and from the same location. The library should refresh each time a different user opens iTunes. I don't know if this will work with Panther and Fast User Switching, but just play around with it - it's bound to work somehow.

 

[kylos]

There's a folder in Mac OS X meant for sharing between users. It's, shockingly enough, called shared and is located in the users folder along with all the user accounts. Store your library there.

Kwyjibo, I haven't messed with iTunes music folder positioning in a while, so I'm not sure what your problem is, but a simple solution would be to create a symbolic link (alias, in non-unix terminology) pointing to a shared location so that when one person updates something they're really updating the shared location.

 

[bezva]

Thanks

Thanks for all the help everyone. I have set up a drive just for music, which is partitioned and each of the multiple users have read/write abilities. However, Itunes does not recognize the new files added when one user imports. I am trying to figure out a way to make itunes do this. Both users are set to look at the same library but they don't see the changes or updates in the files.

I didn't want to use the drive I have my OS on to store my music, but I guess if the shared folder is the only option I will have to go that route.

If anyone has more options, I would love to hear about them.

Thanks again!

 

[Stike]

Originally posted by Kwyjibo
the tricky part is figuring out a way to keep the song you add on one account or in one OS to add in another OS

iSync 1.3 anyone? Syncing iTunes playlists would be a cool feature, really...

 

[kylos]

IIRC, the music folder can be located outside of your home folder, but iTunes will look for the library file in your music folder. The easiest way to solve this would be to replace the library files ~/music/iTunes/iTunes 4 Music Library and ~/music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml with aliases to those same files in your shared library.

Example, you share the music on a partition called iTunes. So in /Volumes/iTunes/ you would have three items, the folder iTunes Music and the files iTunes 4 Music Library and iTunes Music Library.xml. Make aliases for the 2 files, giving them the name of the original files and place them in ~/music/iTunes/ (~ is your home folder). This will result in only one database shared between all users so an update to the library will work for all.