Change media path during installation of iTunes

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to re-package the software. This seems to work fine beside some "glitches". One of it is that the media path per default is set to "Music\iTunes" which is - in this environment - included in the roaming part of the profile. So I was asked to "shift" the media path to the local part of the profile (non-roaming). Excluding "Music" from roaming seems to be no option here.
Switching the location to another part of the profile gives me a headache as it's still "variable" (not like D:\iTunes or so). As far as I understood the path is stored in a file called "iTunes Library.itl" and this file seems to be not editable to me. Any idea how to 'tweak' the path into during the installation or may be during first startup of the program without user interaction?
Kind regards
János

Answer 1

The iTunes Library.itl file is the library itself. I believe the location of the active library is stored in:
<AppData>\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml
under the key iTunes Library Location:1 however it is not stored in plain text so you may need to experiment a bit to find out whether you can simply copy over an existing iTunesPrefs.xml file that targets a fixed location like the root of a drive, e.g. D:\iTunes, as part of your distribution (yes, I note that you don't really want a fixed path) or if you can decipher the encoding scheme you could patch the xml file to a provide a customised path. Alternatively you ought to be able to reconfigure the user account such that <User's Music> is stored outside of the roaming profile before iTunes is installed. By default iTunes will create its initial library at <User's Music>\iTunes where it reads <User's Music> from the registry.
Note also that the iTunes library doesn't function properly if placed at the end of a folder redirection, although this can, and probably should, be used to relocate any MobileSync\Backup folder as these too can grow quite large and you probably don't want them as part of a roaming profile, or on an SSD startup drive.
tt2