[Hall11]

I just bought a new iPod and gave the old one to my son We both use the same Mac, but have different accounts. The music library is located on an external hard drive accessable to both accounts.

I have configured iTunes in my account to point to the music library on the external hard drive. I then share the library in order to make it accessable from my son's account. However, now as my son also has an iPod, I will probably have to make some changes to this setup.

1. Is it possible to configure iTunes in my son's account to use the same external library as iTunes in my account?

2. Will songs that each of us add to the library automatically be available in iTunes in both accounts?

3. Can we sync iPods in the different account against the same library without messing it up?

4. We have different music taste. He will probably want to sync some of the songs that I like, but also songs that I have no interest in syncing (and vise versa). Do we place songs in playlists in order to achive this?

5. When syncing playlists, can I have a particular playlist automatically updated with the newest Podcast-episodes or do I manually have to copy the episodes to the playlist?

6. What happens if one of us deletes a song in the library?

Regards,
Hall

[kyles_mac]

Okay, hopefully there will be a lot of other people replying to this because I can't answer all these questions, but hopefully the answers that I give will help out a little. I'll try to answer the best I can.


To make this the easiest possible what I would personally do (and only do this if you have enough hard drive space) is to have your son create a seperate folder that he only have permission and access to that he can put all of his music/podcasts and what-not, and you do the same on yours. You should be able to do it on the EXT hard drive. Even if you wanted to, have two seperate iTunes running on the computer, one for you and one for your son.

I know there is a way to do this with setting up user permissions and doing it that way, but I would think this way would be the easiest (maybe?) Hope this helps at all. If not, well, I gave it a shot.

[ghporter]

You should know that iTunes will maintain songs in your personal folders unless you choose otherwise. You mention "external library," which I take to mean some shared folder on the Mac-I use a network drive for this purpose. I'll use "external library" to refer to music on a shared folder, and "personal library" or some such to refer to the music that iTunes stores in a user's personal folders.

1) Yes, just use the "Add Folder" option to add the external library (or selected parts of it) to your son's library. That won't move the music unless you tell iTunes to do that, but it will make it available.

2) No. You'll have to add the new folder each time if you add the songs to the external library, or if you add it to the user's personal library, it'll be in the user folder of the user who adds it.

3) Since the sync is only going to change what's on the iPod, it can't hurt the library.

4) Select which songs/albums/artists you want from your external library and add them; your son can do likewise. Just don't use the "Add Folder" option for the whole library-choose only what you want.

5) Syncing podcasts is slightly different from syncing playlists because of the periodic nature of podcasts. You can configure iTunes to dump podcasts you've listened to and automatically retrieve new ones, which means you can have a lot of turnover for podcasts on your iPod, while playlists typically just grow bit by bit (or shrink a little as you get tired of a song).

6) If it's the external library, then the song is gone for both. If it's a personal library, that will only affect the user who deletes that song.

Helpful?

[kyles_mac]

ghporter,


Thirty times better than my answer.

[Hall11]

Thanks for your answers! Yes, it was really helpfull...

When I say "external hard drive", I'm referring to a firewire connected external hard drive that's connected locally to the Mac. In my account, I have actually changed the settings so that my iTunes library is located on this external disk. The disk is available to all other accounts on the machine.

Maybe I should reconsider this setup. Maybe each one of us should have a local and private iTunes library where we can store music that would not be of interest to each other. And the external hard drive could contain music we both like and could be added to the library as you suggest in point 1? However, if I ripp songs that are of interest to us both, is it possible to direct these songs to the external hard drive so they will be available to both of us? (or will they automatically be loaded into one of our local iTunes libraries?)

Regards,
Hall

[kyles_mac]

Hall,

In the iTunes pref's you can change where the rip directs the music to. It should be under Importing.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by kyles_mac

ghporter,


Thirty times better than my answer.

I started out with "Yep, nope, yep..." but that sounded a little too brief.