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 ?

The iMac has landed!

Welcome to planet Apple, the iMac has landed!

A spanking 20″ iMac, 2.4 GHz, 320MB HDD machine was delivered by a very nice man in a brown UPS uniform yesterday lunchtime. Just the activity of unpacking and setting up was an indulgent experience, the way in which these machines are packaged sets them apart from the vast majority of other computer manufacturers. Everything, even down to the cardboard and plastic packaging has been considered from a design perspective to look good whilst still fulfilling the required function.

This was only ordered on Tuesday lunchtime and was delivered less than 24 hours later. That’s impressive. I am sure this wouldn’t have been the case had any modifications from standard specification been required. In the short-term, the only upgraded required are memory and an external hard-disk (for backup purposes). However as Apple themselves charge an exhorbitant amount for memory, this has been purchased from Crucial.

Whilst I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, I have been extremely impressed so far. The screen makes everything look good, even the mediocre content! Prior to ordering I was very tempted to purchase some external speakers, however I’m glad I decided not to order immediately as the internal speakers are suprisingly good and more than adequate for my purposes.

This was delivered pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger) which I was somewhat suprised about. It did however ship with a Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) DVD in the box which I immediately upgraded to after completing the initial setup for Tiger. I also checked for and and installed all software updates prior to doing anything else significant.

As this is a desktop machine, I opted for the standard wired keyboard and mouse which I am impressed with so far. The new ultra-thin keyboard is suprisingly nice to type on, the only thing which took me by suprise was the position of the ‘@’ sign which occupies the same key as the ‘2′. I’m not sure whether this belies the american focus of Apple or whether this is a Mac specific trait.

Had a quick play with the Front Row software and first impressions are it is very good. How much it will be used on this machine, only time will tell. From what I saw I can imagine how this would be used via the Apple iTV device on a big-screen TV.

Impending iMac – come in planet Apple, do you read me?

I have been lusting agonising for a while over an Apple iMac as a replacement desktop computer for home. The last time a new computer was purchased in our household was 1998 (Pentium-II, 266Mhz) and we have managed on that and subsequently a second-hand (Pentium-III, 800MHz) Dell Optiplex which was purchased for £10, for the last 9 years. The Dell which is used as the main desktop is dual-booting between Windows XP and Debian GNU/Linux and is still used on a daily basis for all manner of tasks.

Unfortunately it just doesn’t cut it any more for anything which requires a serious amount of horsepower and as I now want to dabble with video editing etc. the time has come to take the plunge. In actual fact the time came about a year ago but as I had been tracking the developments in the iMac camp, and was aware of the ‘impending’ new hardware in the pipline and the new version of Mac OS X (Leopard), I was happy to delay until both of these had been released.

My rationale behind the decision to move to Apple was based primarily on a couple of factors, the first being that they are designed to work together as a cohesive whole, as opposed to a collection of discrete parts. Secondly as mentioned above I generally favour Linux due to the open-source nature and the ability to use a decent command line environment. I also like the separation between kernel space and user space processes which is something which just doesn’t happen under Windows. However I also have others within my family to consider and they tend to use Windows XP. I am therefore hoping that the introduction of Mac OS X will bring something that will satisfy both camps, the simplicity of something which just works and gives an enjoyable and useful windowing environment with the power and elegance of a Unix-based core under the covers.

Based on all this I am therefore on the cusp of ordering a new aluminium iMac Core 2 Duo. Whilst I initially favoured the 24″ when the new prices were announced, I have accepted that this is just too big for the environment into which it is to reside and am happy to compromise for the 20″ model, I will however go for the better of the two 20″ models which comes with 2.4GHz processor, 320GB HDD and 256 MB ATI Radeon 2600 Pro graphics card. At this stage the only upgrade I am planning to do is to bump the memory up to 2GB.