Essentially, I'd like to take my wife's iTunes library and move it to a drive attached to my Airport Extreme via USB (I don't have a NAS). Is that possible?

Now, I know very little about iTunes, but is it also possible to make this some sort of shared library that we can both access?

It's possible to do both things. With the second one, a "sort of shared library" is exactly what you'll get, "sort of" being the key words.

Moving the library folder is the easy part and getting multiple copies of iTunes to reference that library can be a mixed bag. I've had it work in the past with two Macs, but I no longer do it because I was using both a Mac and Windows system which didn't work out too well. I'm sure two Windows systems would likely work as well as the two Macs did though. Some people say it works well with one of each.

I don't know if you keep your music files within your iTunes library folder, but if you move your music files, you'll probably have to drag them back into iTunes to have it refresh their locations. This *might* be taken care of automatically if they're within the library folder hierarchy.

Anyway, start by copying the library folder to the new location, but don't delete the original. iTunes shouldn't be running at the time. If your music is within this folder structure you can then move to opening iTunes (read below). Otherwise you can now also copy your music to its new location.

Next you will open iTunes but you'll hold down a key to pop up a prompt to allow you to choose a different library. On the Mac, you should hold down the OPTION key as it's opening. For Windows you'll hold down SHIFT.

You'll see a prompt that allows you to create a new library or pick the location of an alternate library to use. Find the copy you made above and it should load in as before.

If your music was within the library hierarchy, hopefully iTunes will update its location and you should be able to play any track you click on. If not, and you've moved your music as well, then you may notice that when you try to play a track a small "!" appears next to it telling you iTunes doesn't know where the music is.

You have two options here. Drag all the music back into iTunes and hope it updates everything, or first delete all music from iTunes and then drag it all in. The second method will definitely avoid duplicates.

On the second computer, just launch iTunes with the key down as above and point it to the new library - once the library has been all sorted out with regards to music location of course.

GIve it a shot.

What about moving over and keeping playlists in sync between multiple machines? I've never sorted that out, but it would be quite nice.

My only suggestion really, is to try what I wrote above. Hopefully the second machine will correctly pick up the playlists from the now-shared library structure/files.

Apart from that, I think you'd have to use something a little more sophisticated, such as another program or script to propagate a playlist from one iTunes DB to another on the alternate machine or a network share.

All solutions will invariably be hacks, since iTunes wasn't designed as a client/server system.

I thought iTunes had the capability of playing tracks from another running instance of iTunes. Am I wrong?

Yes, you can share the tracks of one iTunes instance over the network to another. But this isn't what Mat was asking about. At least that's not what I picked up on since he asked specifically about moving the library to a NAS device.

When you allow sharing from iTunes, the instance where you enable sharing must be running for other instances to see it. That means, in Matt's case, the NAS must be on as well as his wife's computer, in addition to whatever other computer he's going to also use to play tracks. And playing is all you can do.

Lastly, the iTunes instances browsing the share can only see a flat list of loose songs. The tracks cannot be displayed with album artwork or grouped into any of the advanced views normally possible when browsing a "local" library.

I suppose in this fashion it sort of is a client/server solution, except that the clients are severely crippled when compared to the "server" iTunes instance. You also can't copy any of the music nor can you put it onto an iPod connected to the "client" instances.

My suggestion and instructions simply point various instances of iTunes to a library existing on a shared drive, but which iTunes otherwise sees as "local."

Fair enough. Lots of limitations, but it might be useful to Matt anyway.


Okay, that's super-lame.

The browsing of iTunes shares is definitely super lame, but I don't want to give the impression that the tracks aren't in any kind of order...

Once the track listing has been downloaded (that's the other pain in the ass), you can sort by the various columns normally displayed at the top of your track listing. So while you can't change views, you can still generally scroll through the list in some meaningful order. The positive here is that you can still triple-click the ALBUM heading which will change it to "Album by Year" which will first sort the list by Artist, then the tracks of each album in track number order, where each album is listed consecutively by its year of release. There are no separators between albums and there's no artwork visible. This is the lack of grouping and views I mentioned.

These are actually the same limitations as when browsing music on a connected iPod. And together, I consider them the weakest points in iTunes and a clear demonstration of lack of consistency in UI design.

Oh, you CAN see the artwork of the currently playing track in the pop-up artwork display area on the far left of the window, under the source list. But it's impossible to see the artwork for tracks that are not playing, even if you "Get Info" on a track.

With my master music collection containing over 27000 tracks, it actually brings in the track listing in a respectable time. It took about 25 seconds in a test I just performed.

Yeah, I didn't want to go the sharing route for every reason you mentioned. It's pretty bad.

So you think it might be as easy as simply pointing two iTunes installations at the same set of files? I guess that makes sense. If I updated the library from one iTunes instance, I assume it would update the library (it's an XML file, isn't it?) and the other iTunes instance would see it the next time it was started up. Am I thinking correctly here?

Thanks for the tips. I'll be trying this on Friday when I have some time.

It should be exactly that easy. It's worked for me in the past. What I had issues with was pointing both a Mac and a Windows machine at the same library. Since the pathing uses a different syntax on the two platforms, iTunes would eventually not be able to find the music files on one of the systems.

Conceivably this could be gotten around if the paths were shares for both systems and ended up using the same syntax. In my testing I was storing the files locally on the Windows box and things just wouldn't work out no matter what I tried. You shouldn't have this problem with two Windows machines or two Macs.

The library file is in some database format. The XML file is only a backup as far as I recall.

I thought I'd give a report of my results.

Bruno, I actually followed a different procedure when it came to moving the library, and did all of it in iTunes. I did it this way because, as you alluded to in your instructions, the music on her computer was not all under the iTunes folder's hierarchy, but were in several different places on the machine, making it impossible to have the same relative locations on the shared drive. Here are the steps I took:

- went into advanced options in iTunes
- changed the library location to the folder I wanted on the shared drive
- checked the box next to "copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library"
- then I went to file > library > consolidate library

And after a couple hours, all the files that iTunes had links to were now copied onto the one NAS folder. It worked really well.

But then the awkward part came. Not only was I trying to move the library and share it, I was also replacing my wife's computer. What the above procedure doesn't mention is that the actual library files don't get transferred to your NAS, they stay where they always were, in the My Music\iTunes folder.

Fortunately, this didn't turn out to be a difficult thing at all. As long as the NAS is on the same drive letter on both PCs, the library files can be put anywhere. So I put them on the NAS manually, and just pointed the new computer to it and everything worked just fine. All the playlists were there and everything.

Then, just as you said Bruno, I pointed iTunes on my own computer to the library on the NAS, and there you have it, two computers sharing one library! I'm able to add music on my computer and it shows up on both.

The only thing I'm worried about at this point is whether both instances of iTunes can be open at the same time, and what would happen if I added music using either machine with both open. Fortunately there's never a reason that needs to happen, but it might accidentally if one of us forgets to close it on our computer.

Anyway, thanks for the advice guys. I can report that it's working great, even though I'm not a big fan of iTunes. And now I need to go and shut down all those damn services that iTunes sets up, since I don't have an iPod and don't want one. Ugh.

I'd make sure to backup the library files from time to time, just to make sure nothing bad happens. iTunes writes to it quite a bit, due to the music count and last played tracking. Also, you can turn on music sharing more as a reminder that the other instance is on. If you see something under "Shared", it's time to go close down the iTunes instance on the other machine. This will require the Bonjour service to be kept on though.

I don't use iTunes to manage music location, including moving tracks, so I didn't mention this. All my music is under one main folder, but it's not the "iTunes hierarchy."

The important thing is that iTunes knows where all the music is in the end, so it would also have been fine to manually copy the music to where you wanted it and then just drop it all back into iTunes. The way you did it however has the advantage of preserving any track stats and also preventing any duplicates which might then need to be pruned.

Now you might read otherwise on the net, but you can't have a Mac share that same iTunes library (the library file and DB itself, not the music).

Do both computers upload/install new tracks? If not, how about setting one to access the share read-only? iTunes might choke on that, but it's worth trying.

I think both computers will definitely need to add music. But that's not a big deal. I'm almost never going to be in iTunes anyway, and the number of times we'd both need to have it open at the same time would be miniscule.

Bruno, you're right, it's sort of the same as just moving all the files manually, but this has the benefit of some level of certainty. iTunes knows where all the music is to start with, so it will make sure that it moves everything to the folder you specify.

But to clarify, you don't have to let iTunes maintain the music to make this work (that checkbox right under the library location section of the advanced preferences). I had that box unchecked and this method still worked. Now all the music is basically under Z:\Music. The iTunes library files are in a different folder (Z:\iTunes, I believe). Now I just move music over to the NAS into the Music folder, and add it to iTunes. It's working pretty well, actually.


Oh, I'm definitely going to back up regularly. I don't want to rebuild this thing. Ugh. I'm also less than 100% confident about the NAS enclosure I got So yes, very regular backups will be done.

I don't think I'll need to do the sharing thing, but that's a good idea. If her computer was in another part of the home instead of directly behind me I'd probably do just that. So yes, I'll kill Bonjour in addition to the other two or three services.