Is there a way to lock the location of where iTunes is looking for music regardless of the itl file. I am loading a remote itl file by default ever time but then it's looking for the music on a local drive instead of a network drive.

Question

So I have a number of PC's in the house that are dumping music into a central PC with a network shared drive.
The music is dumped into the "automatically added to library" folder on the remote PC.  Itunes is always running in the background.
When I open iTunes on my local PC a script retrieves the newest ITL file from the remote PC, then the script opens iTunes using the updated ITL file.
This way I have a fresh copy of the remote library music every time.  The problem is the music location under advanced settings.  I can change it every time but I would like to make this as automatic as possible.  The question I guess is if there is a way to lock the music location or have it change via a script every time iTunes opens.

Answer 1

You can't change the location of the media folder from a script, neither can you change which library file is opened. I assume your script simply copies the current master library into the normal location for the file on each client machine. Do you not get a file locked error? What about the other library files and the Album Artwork cache?
Your scheme may work best if you use a common drive letter for your media folder and have it so the media folder is not inside the master library folder. E.g.
Master library folder at X:\iTunes
Master media folder at X:\iTunes Media
Where all the computers see drive X: as the same object, be it the whole of that drive or a shared folder on it.
If you have the typical arrangement (iTunes Media inside iTunes) then when you copy the library from X:\iTunes into C:\....\iTunes and start iTunes it will attempt to "correct" for the fact that you've apparently moved the library and reset the library folder to C:\....\iTunes\iTunes Media. It should still be able to find the media at the correct location, but if you accidentally load anything up from a client machine it will end up in a local folder.
If you are not already familiar with it iTunes Folder Watch will be a useful tool for catching up with any additions made on the client computers. You should probably also ensure that each of the clients has the "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" option disabled.
tt2