Can i decide where iTunes is to collect the files for the libary?

Question

I installed iTunes on my windows pc. It automatically collected the Music from the Music folder. Is there a way to decide where to collect from?

Answer 1

A couple things. One, if you only want to be able to access/play from the XP main computer on your laptop, you can use iTunes sharing function and the main XP Home computer's library will show up on the laptop as a shared library that you can play. It is a read only connection so you won't be able to change anything, add anything, etc.
If you instead wanted to move the library somewhere where both computers can have FULL read & write access to the same library, that will be a problem. Right now iTunes is not set up to handle this and two computers trying to write to the same iTunes database file is likely to cause conflicts and file corruption.
You could set it up so both computer have their own database files to maintain their own library listing, but still have one location shared by both computers to store all the media files and share them. But you will manually have to update certain things on the other computer if you do stuff like add a CD on the first computer. E.g. you import a CD on computer A. The media files are on the shared folder/drive, but computer B will not automatically "see" them. You would then have to go to Computer B and File -> Add to Library... (or drag and drop) those new files to Library B to add them there as well. But at least both libraries are sharing the same media files and not doubling them up.
Regards,
Patrick