Multiple User Accounts + iTunes Question

[pelorick]

Hello,

We have a macbook pro running Leopard. My wife and I have separate user accounts on the single laptop and keep the music in one central Public folder (both or our iTunes are pointed to this public folder). For some reason, my wife is unable to make any changes to song info (album art, change genre, etc.). However, she can play the music, update her Nano, import music, etc. The only thing she can't do is make changes to the song info. This isn't an issue with my account because I am the primary user account on the computer. We are both set up as Admin and I have assigned Read/Write privileges to all files. Does anyone have any idea what the issue could be? Tech support/program specialist has no idea. Thank you for any suggestions.

 

[26139]

yes

Put the shared library into the Shared folder. Both users have read/write privileges to this folder.

With public folders it's much trickier, as the other user can copy files to it, but can't make changes to existing files.

 

[ChrisA]

Hello,

We have a macbook pro running Leopard. My wife and I have separate user accounts on the single laptop and keep the music in one central Public folder (both or our iTunes are pointed to this public folder). For some reason, my wife is unable to make any changes to song info (album art, change genre, etc.). However, she can play the music, update her Nano, import music, etc. The only thing she can't do is make changes to the song info. This isn't an issue with my account because I am the primary user account on the computer. We are both set up as Admin and I have assigned Read/Write privileges to all files. Does anyone have any idea what the issue could be? Tech support/program specialist has no idea. Thank you for any suggestions.

First off you should NOT be working and doing normal stuff inan Admin account. It defeats the whole purpose of having an admin account. Make one account call it Admin and never log into it.

What happens is that there is a default permission that is used for all new files. It is set so the owner can read/write and others can read only. Tis is causiing the problems you see but I'd not suggest changing it.

On my system every user has his own iTunes Library and if you want to hear music from anothr you enable sharing inside of iTunes.

 

[26139]

On my system every user has his own iTunes Library and if you want to hear music from anothr you enable sharing inside of iTunes.

Yeah, that won't work if you want to be able to use a combined library to sync from, not just listen from.

My idea to put the itunes folder in the shared folder will work AND it will allow you to only have one version of a song (you undoubtedly have SOME similar music tastes), unlike the previous poster's idea, which will require separate copies of everything.

 

[pelorick]

Yeah, that won't work if you want to be able to use a combined library to sync from, not just listen from.

My idea to put the itunes folder in the shared folder will work AND it will allow you to only have one version of a song (you undoubtedly have SOME similar music tastes), unlike the previous poster's idea, which will require separate copies of everything.

All,

Thank you for your responses. Last night I tried a test library while I was talking to a tech. I created a test library in the "Shared" folder and imported a couple of songs. I then used Option/Open to choose the new library for my wife's iTunes. The music was there, played fine, but I was unable to make any changes to the song info (same issue I was having with it in the public folder). The song info isn't grayed out or ghosted, but it will not allow the info fields to be selected. Very strange... I and the techs are stumped!

 

[sreedy]

All,

Thank you for your responses. Last night I tried a test library while I was talking to a tech. I created a test library in the "Shared" folder and imported a couple of songs. I then used Option/Open to choose the new library for my wife's iTunes. The music was there, played fine, but I was unable to make any changes to the song info (same issue I was having with it in the public folder). The song info isn't grayed out or ghosted, but it will not allow the info fields to be selected. Very strange... I and the techs are stumped!

Sounds like your wife only has read permissions on the files, if you are ok with terminal you could check the permissions and if they are only readable by group you could chmod -R w+g /path/to/your/files (inc. the itunes lib xml file)

NOTE: this would be make them writeable by any users on your machine.

 

[26139]

yep

Sounds like your wife only has read permissions on the files, if you are ok with terminal you could check the permissions and if they are only readable by group you could chmod -R w+g /path/to/your/files (inc. the itunes lib xml file)

NOTE: this would be make them writeable by any users on your machine.

what he said

 

[gmeddles]

If you want to do this using one single library, you should look into using ACL's for file security for the entire music structure. ACL's use a different paradigm then simple user/group old-school Unix-style permissions and should easily clear up your problem. In the past, my wife and I did this with a common library without a problem.

It would be nice to keep two libraries with the same contents but different ratings, checkmarks for syncing, etc. We haven't been able to find a nice way to keep the contents of two separate libraries on the same machine in sync easily however. We've been able to share a common library for the media files, but there is no easy way to add music in one step across two libraries because iTunes doesn't watch the media folders for changes. If the wife adds new music, I don't get it in my Library or vice versa.