Sharing music and printing labels

[chazmox]

My wife and I share a Powerbook, so with fast user switching I thought it would be nice to have two separate log ins for various and obvious reasons.

But, I'd like iTunes to share the music between both logins. First I went to the current owner and set the permissions for that the other login could read and write ( for some reason I could not get permissions to propagate downward, but that's another story... ); however, when I set the new iTunes preference to point to the other login's iTunes folder, no music shows up... what gives???

Also, has anyone played with the lable printing capability in address book? It seems limited in which labels I can print and where on the label sheet. Currently, I can't find how to print one label at row x, column y on the sheet.

Anyone have any idea on these?

 

[User X]

The way I made this work is to take the iTunes music folder (from the primary account) and move it to the shared folder. Then open iTunes and change the location of the music folder in preferences in each account. Works fine. Hope this helps.

 

[coumerelli]

Originally posted by User X
The way I made this work is to take the iTunes music folder (from the primary account) and move it to the shared folder. Then open iTunes and change the location of the music folder in preferences in each account. Works fine. Hope this helps.

I think you can also just put an alias of the folder there. At least I know that works for iPhoto.

 

[MoparShaha]

I went to do the same thing. After awhile of playing around with it, I figured iTunes wants to have an "iTunes Muisic Library" and "iTunes Music Library.xml" file in a folder called "iTunes" in each account, either in the Music folder or Documents folder. So, I put my main Library files and all my songs in the "Shared" folder, and created aliases of the two Library files and put them into the "iTunes" folders of each user account, replacing the ones that were there. This way, when iTunes launches on any account, its using an alias as its Library, and all those aliases lead back to the original one in the Shared folder.

And as the poster before me said, make sure you change the location of your music library within the iTunes preferences to the iTunes folder within the "Shared" folder.

[edit]: spelling

 

[chazmox]

I tried the shared trick but it didn't work - the alias in the shared folder is an interesting idea... I'll try it and see...

 

[chazmox]

Followup

Ok, MoparShahar was definately on to something as moving the music to the shared folder and then putting aliases in my music folder worked for the original account and would have worked for the new account except for permissions.

I changed the permissions to allow the other login to work with the files; however, the permission change would not propagate to all the individual songs when the iTunes folder permissions were changed. I went to terminal and had some problems with the names ( how does terminal handle spaces? I had to edit the spaces out to use file names and directories without spaces ). Couldn't chgrp *.* within the directory, but when I chgrp -R the directory, it then worked... whew... who knew that would be such a struggle!!

Any back to my purely Panther only question... how to print individual labels in Address Book - I'm going to call Apple tomorrow on that one!

 

[coumerelli]

As far as printing individual lables out of the address book - it's as easy as (eating) pie. In the 'Name' column (as apposed to the 'group' column hi-lite the name you want. Be sure that it's not just up in the preview pane, but selected also (as indicated by the (default) blue). Print. At the bottom of the print dialogue there is either 'standard options' or 'advanced options.' Be sure you are in the 'advanced.' Your 'style' then should be 'mailing labels' not 'lists.'

Now, if you want to send a few people a letter, you would thing 'Apple-clicking' a few names would suffice. But it seems to only give you one label still. BUT!!! You can just create a group and select THAT and print all the labels you need. Kinda cool!

Hope this helps.

 

[chazmox]

Actually the main problem with the label printing ( which I stated in the initial post but not in the follow up ) is how to print a label in row x and column y. See often I only want one label printed, maybe for a letter or a bill. It doesn't make much sense to then throw away the sheet, so the next one I print will be in the next column - hence the need to print single labels in defined positions.

It seems like an easy functionality to add - and I can do it in Word, but I would like to do it in Address Book...

 

[coumerelli]

Originally posted by chazmox
Actually the main problem with the label printing ( which I stated in the initial post but not in the follow up ) is how to print a label in row x and column y. See often I only want one label printed, maybe for a letter or a bill. It doesn't make much sense to then throw away the sheet, so the next one I print will be in the next column - hence the need to print single labels in defined positions.

It seems like an easy functionality to add - and I can do it in Word, but I would like to do it in Address Book...

yup. I hear you. You do have the option to print directly to a #10 envelope too, for instance. But I know exactly what you mean.

 

[MoparShaha]

chazmox, "Get Info" on your music folder, and go to Ownership and Permissions. Change the permissions so that "Admin" or "Others" has Read/Write access. Then click the button that says "Apply to Enclosed Items". That should change all the permissions for all your songs with one fell swoop.

 

[coumerelli]

About the music folder...

boy, and you'd think Apple would have just built this in. bah!

 

[chazmox]

Originally posted by MoparShaha
chazmox, "Get Info" on your music folder, and go to Ownership and Permissions. Change the permissions so that "Admin" or "Others" has Read/Write access. Then click the button that says "Apply to Enclosed Items". That should change all the permissions for all your songs with one fell swoop.

Actually, I tried that first and it didn't work - don't know why, but from the GUI, no matter how many times I tried to change the permissions of the folder AND it's contents, the contents wouldn't change - I had to go into terminal to do it...

Beats me!

 

[e-coli]

I can't seem to figure out how to print multiple mailing labels onto a sheet from address book.

For instance, I want to print a full sheet of Avery labels with my info, so I don't have to print them out individually, one at a time. And what do you do with the sheet after you've printed your first label? Throw it out?

Right now, this is an extremely worthless feature. Very poor, Apple. Very poor.

0 stars.