Ok.. best way to ACTUALLY share between two users in iTunes

[Yendog]

Okay... so me and my wife have two users on our computer... what is the best way to share the music...?

I.E. If I import a disk on my side she can bring it into her computer (preferably without duplicating the actual file) and upload it to her iPhone, burn etc.

We currently have both our libraries pointing to the same folder... the folder is "Shared" and I have tried to give permissions to everything in the folder.

There are a lot of annoying work arounds... you can go into the "add to library" and then find the file in the finder and add it to the library.

you can drop it into our "shared" folder that we use to pass files back and forth but it keeps saying that she doesn't have "permission" and I have to go into the finder, and then the album folder and give permission.... If I just go to the parent iTunes folder and give permission and "apply to enclosed items" it doesn't actually apply it to all the folders...

Just wondering how people have figured out the best, easiest, and cleanest work around...

I realize that most of this has to do with the music companies and them trying to stop the sharing of music.. but I'm a full time professional musician and even I know that that time is past and this stuff is just getting annoying that it has to be this hard to share files between users...

Yes both libraries are shared also... and you can listen but you can't upload, etc from a "shared library" in iTunes...

 

[JediMeister]

After reading your post, I'm unclear as to whether you are following the steps in this article or not. If you aren't already, try it out. If you are, then I dunno what to tell you because it should be working...

 

[skyeb]

I cannot really help but this is my personal experience. I managed to do this very cleanly with the previous version of iTunes (forgot the version number), for me and my partner (i.e. 2 users) to share the same library on the same iMac, including playlists etc, without to do anything at ALL: 1) The actual music files were indeed in the Shared folder, under iTunes/iTunes Media/
2) I generated under one account the music library files (including the .xml and the genius and extra library files) by "Adding to Library" the music files. Then I closed iTunes and MOVED the files to the Shared folder, then added the other user to the files for reading and writing permissions (by using the Info window). Then for each user I generated symbolic links with the Terminal (ln -s) pointing to these files. The links were put under each Users/userx/Music/iTunes/ folder, with exactly the same names that the ones in Shared/
3) et voila! iTunes was completely fooled into believing that the symbolic links under each account were the actual library files.

The big mistake I did was to update to the latest version of iTunes (compatible with Lion I presume, without a backup). It is a big mess now, completely broken, apparently because the new version of iTunes has different library files now. However I managed to share again the mp3 files but the actual library files are not shared anymore. If one of us add or purchase music, the other one has to manually "Add to Library", very annoying. Make sure you uncheck "copy files to library when adding ..." otherwise you will end up with extra copies of the music files. Basically it is following the method in http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1203, which is less than elegant I think. I am looking forward to figure out how the iTunes library files work so I can go back to my previous configuration.
ps: I am doing the same with iPhoto but it is very unstable, sometimes allowing photos to be shared, sometimes not, a huge disappointment.