iPod Sharing music between family members

[red4re]

I am new to ipods and am a PC guy. I have one PC at home running XP with multiple profiles for our 4 family members. Three of us have Ipods. We each have our own profile and Itunes library. We want to share some songs between users and not have to buy the same songs two or three times through the itunes store. Is that possible?

Basically, for example, if my wife has three songs that she bought, can my son copy those songs to his Ipod. If so, how do you do that?

Thanks

red

 

[AdrianK]

Yes, it's possible. All you have to do is find the location of the song and add it to your personal itunes library, by dragging and dropping via explorer or the file menu.

There isn't an easy way to browse another user's library without physically logging to their account, though. you could use the search function in explorer (for the name of the song) or drill down through the folders manually (C:\documents and settings\USER\my documents\My Music\iTunes). However, depending on how the accounts are set up, you might not be able to browse another user's documents.

One thing you could do, is have each user set their iTunes folder to a single folding in the root of C:\, would make things really easy. That way when anyone bought a song or ripped a CD it would go to a folder everyone can easily access. So if you made a folder in Local Disk, called 'Shared Music' (or whatever), then have each user to to Edit > Preferences > Advances > iTunes Media Folder Location > set it to that shared folder.

 

[douglaswilliams]

Do AdrianK's second option!

If you do the first (copy the music from their library into your library) the each song file will be on your hard drive multiple times - if you have large music collections this can fill up a drive fast.

So, have everyone move their music library to the same folder and then change the location in iTunes (the way AdrianK said to). It might be a good idea to move all the artist folders (do it for each user, then continue), open iTunes (canceling any warnings about iTunes not finding you music files), highlight all your music (Ctrl+A), delete it (this should delete the entry from the library, not the actual file), and then change the music folder location as AdrianK mentioned. It should re-scan the all the files and add them back into the library. This should prevent duplicate entries in the library, where half the links would be broken.

I hope that helps.

Also, once everyone's music is consolidated, make sure and back it all up how ever you want to because...eventually...your computer WILL DIE.