Can more than one log in on a computer share an iTunes account while having a separate itunes store log in?

Question

I'd follow-up with that question by asking?
a) Can someone in my family share the the library on their computer while away at college using files put on another external drive
b) Where is the **** ITunes Library file stored?  In the same folder where my data is stored?
c) what happens if you keep the Itunes file organized, but do not copy them into the designated ITunes folder?
Lnow that is a lot.  However with ICloud here and my having three power PC computers this info is crucial since the previous instructions to copu to my idisc and put them in my various machines will be gone\.
Thank's
Theo

Answer 1

I will share with you what I have done to manage this with my family.  While the solution isn't without flawes, it seems to do the trick.  First, you need to have one person who is managing the synching of everyone's devices.  In my family, I have three iphones, about to be four, and five ipads.  We all synch to the same apple ID to allow one another to take seemless advantage of our Itunes, which is on our Imac.  To synch individual music or video interests, we simply select which playlists we want and manually synch that way.  A couple of us use imatch and the cloud to make the entire library accessable as well.  With respect to the imessage, mail, contacts, etc. we each have a gmail account for our individual emails, contacts etc.  So for instance, my forth grade daughter has a gmail account that we choose to synch her contacts, calendar, etc to and then that is also the account where she receives her imessages from on her ipad and itouch. My son, who has an iphone and ipad, does the same thing, but under settings, he goes to imessage and checks his phone number and his email as his preferred way to receive imessages and texts.  My wife and I do the same thing.  To avoid having everyone see one anothers contracts etc, we only synch contacts from our individual email accounts.  Here is the downfall to this:  When you update your phone or add a new device, apple always wants to reset everyone's facetime and imessage settings and then low and behold we are all receiving imessages from one another's friends etc.  To work around this, I simply take each of their devices and go to their imessage settings and only check the email and phone numbers relative to their devices.  I dont' know is this is the best solution, but it seems to work for us.