iTunes sharing between user accounts

[Matt-Man-Plus]

Can someone please help me with this? My wife and I have been refrencing the same iTunes library from our individual user accounts in our shared folder on our unibody MacBook for over a year now. Why is it that when I add something to the library, either a purchase from the iTunes store or whatever, it doesn't show up in my wife's library automatically? It has to be added manually on her account.

Now, when she buys a song from iTunes, it downloads to her user account's iTunes music folder, not to the shared folder. Then if I want the song in my library, I have to manually add it. We're both using the same iTunes store user account. There HAS to be an easier way to do this. We both have the "keep iTunes library orginized" checked. I've been through all
of the prefrences and I'm pretty sure everything is setup correctly.

Anyone know what we maybe doing wrong or a way to make this work properly?

 

[Diet Pepsi]

If you purchased One to One, you can go out to the Apple store and see a Genius. Or you can sign up for a One to One session for a "project" and work with a guy/girl, on your library for up to 3 hours.

Also, I have found that phone support is great.

Sorry that I don't know the answer to your question, but I am going out to Apple in the morning, to delete an extra library, so I thought that I would mention it..

 

[Matt-Man-Plus]

Appreciate your response Diet and I will likely end up calling Apple support for this, but Theres gotta be plenty of people who have the exact same setup and have it working.

 

[NightStorm]

I couldn't figure out a great way to do it and have everything work as I wanted it to. I ended up creating a third user account (itunes) that we both can login to and sync our iPhones or purchase content from the iTunes Store. It works, but I'm really hoping Apple addresses this scenario (as well as better support for media stored on a NAS) in a future version of iTunes.

EDIT: Should have also pointed out that we use fast user switching mode, and iTunes needs to always be open so our AppleTVs can stream content.

 

[ReggaeFire]

The problem with your setup was that you each had your own iTunes library xml file, which won't be updated when it's not active (it has no way to know that the files have been added when it's not active).

The trick to making your scenario work is having the iTunes library xml files in a folder that is seen by both user accounts at all times, such as /users/Shared. The problem with that is that iTunes is built to only look in ~/Music/iTunes for the files. I haven't ever tried this, but if you copied one of your iTunes folders into the Shared folder, then put aliases of that folder in each of your ~/Music/iTunes folders, I can't see why it wouldn't work. Permissions might get muddled. You might have to force the file to be read/write for everyone. Like I said, never tried, it might not work, but it may work.

*Edited to add*
Upon further thought, I forgot that they made this pretty easy somewhere around iTunes 5.
If you want to keep your existing playlists and such, first copy your iTunes library file to the /Users/Shared folder. (If you don't care about keeping your existing playlists, you can create a new library in the next step)

Quit iTunes if it is running, then hold down the option key when you launch iTunes, this will bring up a dialog box to Choose or create a new library. Point it to the library file in /Users/Shared and then do the same for the other user account and you should be done.

 

[Matt-Man-Plus]

Wow thank you so much. That worked perfectly. Can't believe We've been doing it wrong for all this time. My lost her playlists but that's no big deal, considering. Thanks again.