Comments on: Sharing iTunes Libaries with Multiple Users in Windows XP

By: cam

cam — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:56:16 +0000

Just set this up with iTunes 9/XP. Used Winbolic to create a junction from each MyMusic/iTunes to one under Shared Music. So far, so good…

I’m still *completely staggered* that iTunes doesn’t support this. In 2010.

By: Kevin Holmes

Kevin Holmes — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 10:52:23 +0000

This has also worked for me for years. Great solution. I’ve just upgraded to iTunes 9 and the programme in iots wisdom has copied all the music from the shared directory into each users iTunes folder. The User/Music/iTunes still shows up as a shortcut but now contains a copy of the central music folder. HELP its doing my head in.

By: PC Guru

PC Guru — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 01:17:40 +0000

This has worked for me for 2 years. Even when you move the folder containing the music (I use D:\Music) you just need to repoint each user to it. Perfect solution.

By: Kevin Holmes

Kevin Holmes — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:20:15 +0000

Any idea why when I do this iTunes would tell me I don’t have permission to access the iTunes folder which I’ve put in Public/Public Music/iTunes on W Vista?

By: AM

AM — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:34:29 +0000

Excellent. Does exactly what I wanted to do.

So many sites attempt a solution to this problem...most I've read are similar to mine in that you want your wife/girlfriend, etc. to be able to access your playlists, purchases etc. in a centralised library under their own login. This does it.

It's easy enough to move your songs to a central location, the problem is that iTunes maintains it's own library for each user which means if they buy a song and haven'tg told you about it then you will never hear of it. This method gets around the problem of multiple libraries.

I especially like the junction tool. Me thinks I will be using it for other things...

Cheers.

By: craig

craig — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 06:05:05 +0000

Did anybody figure this one out I just got both admin users working great but guest login in says locked and can get permissions figured out

“Space4u2go (20:29:22) : ”

“I am Xp itunes user. I did exactly same thing with junction as mentioned above so everyone can access the itunes library. Unfortunately, users having admin privs are able to access same library without any issues but a limited access user is not able to access the same library getting the error “itunes library.itl file is locked, on locked disk”. How can i resolve this?

P.S. I have done exactly everything specified with junction above.”

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:44:30 +0000

So am I correct in saying that noone has a solution for a copy of Itunes in OSX to use a network share on a PC as it’s base for all it’s music?

By: Juan

Juan — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:22:30 +0000

In case anybody is trying to do what I was trying to do, here is the solution:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93195
So now we don’t have to carry duplicate files but can maintain our separate iTunes libraries on the same computer.

Also, I was unable to delete the junctions I created trying out the method described on this site with the junction -d command. I found a simple solution for this problem using NTFSLink, that I downloaded on this site:
http://www.elsdoerfer.info/=ntfslink

By: Juan

Juan — Wed, 16 May 2007 01:38:23 +0000

I answered my own question. I just tried this and unchecking a song in iTunes under my wife’s section, then opening iTunes on my side I saw the song was also unchecked. She was also able to delete one of my playlists. That’s too bad…this approach was promising.

By: Juan

Juan — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:43:53 +0000

"This setup does allow all of you to automatically sync your iPods with individual settings. So I can sync my iPod with playlists X, Y, Z and Diann can sync hers automatically with playlists A, B, C. No problems there."

Question. What if my wife has a smaller iPod than I have? Since we'd have the same library, my question is, can she simply uncheck my songs that she does not like in her iTunes Music Folder (and vice versa) so that they are not synced on her smaller iPod? In other words, we have lots of the same music, but we both have plenty of music that the other does not like and don't want to waste space on each of our iPods, especially hers which is smaller than mine. Thanks for you help!