[gooser]

a while back when i installed itunes 6 on my computer i copied the installer over to a couple of ipods thinking that someday the installer may become unavailable. if in the future i buy a computer that has an older version of itunes can i use this installer to upgrade? please note that i have absolutely no interest in installing itunes 7 or 8. ( a lot of kids use my computer, i have over 150gb of music on it, they want to copy my music over to their newer ipods and want me to upgrade itunes but i don't want them to copy my music.)

[ibook_steve]

There must be a better solution to your problem than this. There is no guarantee whatsoever that an ancient version of iTunes will continue to work on newer machines. I don't know if the "kids" are yours at home or students in a school, but you could surely update iTunes to the latest and greatest and set up a screen lock or other parental controls to prevent access to iTunes as well as the rest of your computer.

Steve

[gooser]

thanks steve. i would not do this with a "newer" machine. just an older one i would buy from someplace like ebay. also i do not want to prevent these kids from accessing itunes, merely from copying it onto ipods. within the os i also prevent them from using the burner.

[slugslugslug]

Have you considered setting up a separate user account for the kids on your computer? This way, you can leave iTunes running with sharing on in your account. Turn on Fast User Switching, and they can still listen to music from your library, but not access the files.

As a bonus, they also wouldn't be able to access any other files in your Home directory, in case you have stuff you want to store on that computer.

To address your original question, it seems very likely that you'd be able to use the installers you have to update an older version of iTunes to 6.0, unless the machine's hardware or OS specs don't meet iTunes 6's requirements.

[Veltliner]

Originally Posted by gooser 

a while back when i installed itunes 6 on my computer i copied the installer over to a couple of ipods thinking that someday the installer may become unavailable. if in the future i buy a computer that has an older version of itunes can i use this installer to upgrade? please note that i have absolutely no interest in installing itunes 7 or 8. ( a lot of kids use my computer, i have over 150gb of music on it, they want to copy my music over to their newer ipods and want me to upgrade itunes but i don't want them to copy my music.)

Why don't you want to upgrade? You can disable the store feature and the genius feature is disabled by default.

If you don't want your kids to copy your music ( do you have so many adult texts in your songs? just kidding ), it could be handled, as slugslugslug said, by creating different user accounts, and so define wha can be accessed by whom and what not. I guess that's the real reason why you don't want to upgrade: to keep your library incompatible for your kids' iPods.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Veltliner 

I guess that's the real reason why you don't want to upgrade: to keep your library incompatible for your kids' iPods.

Well, yes: That's what he said.

It's not like you've uncovered his real intentions or anything.



I'd think that separate accounts are indeed the way to go.

[gooser]

i don't think separate accounts will work because these kids are the ones who add the music to my itunes (about 10 cd's a week). this has been going on for years. slugslug thinks my plan to use an old installer may work as long as i'm upgrading from an older machine. i guess i was just curious if these installers recognize automatically what type of machine you're downloading to and send you a specific installer. thanks guys.