Comments on: How-to: Share a single iTunes library between you and your wife

By: Cypress

Cypress — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:42:13 +0000

Follow Up: I followed the apple support article to move and consolidate the media folder to the new drive as logged in to my account and with my library open in iTunes. Then using the option method to change libraries (well, I think it’s actually “shift” key in Windows, I reopened iTunes and selected my wife’s library and repeated the move and consolidate. This created the problem that iTunes is not smart enough to realize that the files are the same, and so it duplicated the song and video files on my new drive. But they were not showing up as duplicates in iTunes. I used a program called Beyond Compare to help and searches in Win7 to find the duplicates and delete them. But this then caused iTunes to see the files as missing in my wife’s library. I found a javascript (with the help of another forum) that fixes broken\missing files. All in all a big pain in the butt that took me days to resolve. I expected more from Apple to make transitioning to a new drive easier.

By: lauren harris

lauren harris — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:05:55 +0000

both me and my hubby have iphones, both have apple id’s but share itunes, when hubby plugs iphone into laptop all his contacts were replaced with mine and when he trys to update apps he has bought it asks for my apple is and password eventhough i never bought it he did from his phone help!!!

By: Cypress

Cypress — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:26:56 +0000

So I have windows 7. I’ve had a similar setup to this for awhile. But not sharing the same iTunes library. Just accessing the same media folder. Because we rate songs differently, and she likes folk Lilith fair like music and l like punk rock. But some of our tastes overlap. And I don’t want to duplicate a bunch of music files on my hard drive. And this has been working pretty well. Accept trying to access the different libraries with the AppleTV is a pain, because you have to switch the homesharing account on the AppleTV, and log off\login to the correct account on the computer. But I digress. I am running out of room on my hard drive. So I installed a new drive. I want to move all my media file over to the new drive, but I’m worried that I will totally foul up my wife’s library, since her library will still try to find the files in the old location. There is a decent article on how to move and consolidate to the new “media folder” structure from Apple, but it doesn’t address multiple accounts.

By: Gursewak

Gursewak — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:46:29 +0000

How do you choose a library and not the folder?
I did everything it said but when I press option and click on iTunes, it says ‘File not found’. What’s the solution?

By: Mark Dancer

Mark Dancer — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:36:05 +0000

I’d figured out how to do this all myself, but was running into the “locked disk” problem, and your comments explained what going on (the error message tells you every possible error except what is really wrong).

In our case, we have a slow internet connection, so iTunes is often left open under my userid downloading podcasts, at which point my wife complains that iTunes has stopped working due to the disk being locked. No sure how to solve this, as I need iTunes open to download the podcasts, but at least I now know what is going wrong.

By: Kyle James

Kyle James — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:23:41 +0000

Thanks for this article.

I’ve had my mac for 2 years and just now learning about opening itunes with the option key to select the libraries.

This helped my problem 1000%

By: seth

seth — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:11:42 +0000

Hello! Thanks for this info, we’ve used this setup since 08. One caveat that you’ve probably mentioned in the string above was that you had to close itunes in one account before opening it in the other…that was an inconvenience that we just dealt with because it was so convenient to share the actual music library.
Something happened recently though…some update I suppose, and now the same library appears to be open in both users simultaneously (it actually shows up in come sharing even though it’s the same library, just a different user). I’m really happy with this change as now we won’t have to be aware of who has itunes open and won’t have to go switching back and forth, especially as we use our phones to remotely control our music and it’s a pain to always be switching libraries…I just wanted to see if anyone else had noticed this change and if anyone has tested it at all…I haven’t taken the time to see if changes save while both users have itunes open simultaneously. Thanks for any comments!

By: Josh

Josh — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:51:11 +0000

Lee-
I was correct in the assertion re privileges. If you want to modify a shared file between 2 users permissions need to be updated. It’s annoying, especially with iPhoto, significantly less annoying with iTunes (as one hardly edits music but will often tag people in photos or add locations, etc. To photos).

As for a script to auto close iTunes and iPhoto. I haven’t yet come across anything. Please let me know if you find a solution. Occasionally one or the other of us will not quit iTunes and will corrupt the XML file. Which is easy to fix. IPhoto will not open if it’s running in another users profile.

By: -DjD-

-DjD- — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:33:47 +0000

Not afaik Lee.

By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:54:52 +0000

@Josh/David Did you ever find a solution for either of your two question in comment 37 above? Thanks, Lee