iTunes sharing – the highs and not so highs…

Having switched last year from a combination of Debian GNU/Linux as my primary and Windows XP as my secondary operating system on a dual-boot PC to solely using Mac OS X on an 20″ iMac; I can honestly say I have been absolutely delighted with the overall experience. To my mind Mac OS X has the strength and stability of Unix as the underlying core with the advantages of a superb UI built on top.

As part of this transition, I have also ripped all the CDs in my collection to the hard drive and stored these as ‘higher-quality’ AAC (.m4a) files within my iTunes library. This has all been working fine for me and I have been more than happy with the outcome. However when it comes to sharing this media with other members of my family things start to become a little less perfect.

iTunes seems to have the concept of the ‘media’ and the library which references it and these are potentially separate. As this was originally done under my personal account with the default locations the iTunes library is stored under the following folder (where ~ represents the user account path)

~/Music/iTunes/

and the actual media by default is stored under

~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music

all sorted by Artist and Album. By default this is private to the individual user, to make this accessible to other accounts on the same machine without fiddling with ACLs the recommended way is to either copy this to the default public folder under your account or better still to copy one or more aspects to a shared folder, typically /Users/Shared.

Having done a certain amount of investigation and a fair amount of ‘googling’ on this topic the two recommendations seem to be variations on the above. Either copy both the media and the library to the shared user folder or alternatively copy the media to the shared user folder and then maintain individual libraries to reference this within each individual default location (~/Music/iTunes/).

To my mind both of these approaches have their own drawbacks. My requirements would be (at a very high level obviously) for each user to share the media but for each to possess their own library, in this way each user could have their own individual playlists etc. but reference a common set of media files. However when a user rips a CD and this media is added to the media folder and also their library file, for the other user(s) to automatically ‘detect’ when iTunes next starts that new media is present in the folder and for this to be automatically added to their own library and made accessible.

What seems to happen currently is that if each account owns their own library, whilst this allows them to have their own playlists, if new media is created by another account then this is not detected and this has to be manually added by the other accounts which wish to access this. Not difficult to imagine that in general this would be an unusable situation in the medium term. Alternatively if a common library and media folder is used across accounts then not only is everyones library shared (by definition) and therefore playlists etc. but only one person can access the library at any one time as iTunes insists on gaining a lock on the file.

Hmmmmphh! I wonder who captured the requirements for that one then ?