[indigoimac]

Is there a way to have iTunes store all of its music on a network drive, an iBook in this case which will always be on. I tried to select the music folder by mounting the drive but itunes grays out the option when u go to select the itunes folder. There must be a way to do this, thanks!

[indigoimac]

bumpitybumpbumpbump

someone must know the answer

[benb]

I'll tell you as far as I have gotten with this. In a perfect world I would store my music on my file server in a share called Music. Music would mount at startup. In addition, all users would share the same iTunes library; when one person adds a song, all people see it. iTunes will let me specify /Volumes/Music/iTunes as the library location, however it still reads ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes* for library data like songs and playlists. This means that when one user adds a song, it gets added to the share but not to everyones library. I know that some people like this, but I do not. I would rather see all songs and add the ones I want to a smart playlist for each user by using the comment ID3 tag.

What I currently do to work around this is I created a shell script containing the following:

Code:
#!/bin/sh

cp -f /Volumes/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ 4\ Music\ Library ~/Music/iTunes/
cp -f /Volumes/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml ~/Music/iTunes/

open -a /Applications/iTunes.app

Then I used Platypus to create a double-clickable application out of it and named it "Launch iTunes". I use this Application when I want to open iTunes. It copies the library files stored on the share to the users home directory and then starts iTunes.

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Some limitations that I have not worked out yet follow. First, if you make changes to the library, you must manually update the library on the share. Secondly, if you update the library and someone else updates it before you get a chance to copy the files back one of you is going to lose work. This method will only work if you know that there will not be more than one person updating the library at any one time which means any changes whatsoever: Creating playlists, changing eq settings, importing or deleting songs, etc.

I would like to create another script for quitting iTunes that copies the library files back, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. What would be really sweet is if some clever person that knew how to write code could make an application that starts up iTunes, copies library files, syncs library files at regular intervals when iTunes is open, quits iTunes, and copies library files back on termination all the while looking to the end user as if they had launched iTunes and nothing was up.

Hope this helps!

[benb]

Alright, I swear that iTunes 4.6 did not work with a symbolic link from ~/Music/iTunes to the share, but I just tried it again in 4.7 and it does. If I remember correctly 4.6 would not required a hard link which cannot be done over shares. Or something like that. All I know is a symbolic link did not work then, and it does now. So I guess I can just do

Code:
ln -s /Volumes/Music/iTunes ~/Music/iTunes

I will test this out for a few days and report back.

[indigoimac]

Please do as this appears to be exactly what I want also where are you putting the code in?

[Goldfinger]

Originally posted by indigoimac:
Please do as this appears to be exactly what I want also where are you putting the code in?

The terminal. A symbolic link is the UNIX version of the Alias.