How to copy music library WITHOUT copying settings

Question

I know that there are some similar questions. I promise that mine has some differences that I have not been able to find elsewhere.
My setup is a house full of laptops that all stream music from a central iTunes installation. For years, we've just used my wife's computer (windows) as the iTunes hub. She makes the most purchases and her computer is in a central point in the house so it's easy for the kids to make purchases on our family's account.
Recently, I bought a mac mini and have been turning it into the home server. I want it to also become the iTunes server. At the same time, I would still like my wife's computer to be where we make our purchases.
Accordingly, I setup rsync on a cron job to sync the entire library from my wife's computer to the mac mini. This way, all purchases are moved to the server within a day. My wife's computer still has the whole library, but she doesn't have to stream it to everyone else now. In fact, I turned off sharing for her iTunes installation.
Everything works except for one small problem. Because iTunes ludicrously saves preferences to the iTunes library, when I copy it over using rsync, it copies my wife's settings including having sharing disabled. I tried writing an apple script that could turn sharing back on, but it appears to not be possible. I thought that maybe I could just copy newly purchased media files over instead, but that loses the playlists.
Basically, I need to be able to buy music and create playlists on my wife's computer and have them sync to the server on the mac mini. My wife's computer should not share its library but the mac mini iTunes should. Any suggestions or ideas would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Just use this Applescript to launch iTunes on the mini after every Library sync/change. It works for me in iTunes 11 to change the preferences of the target computer*:
tell application "iTunes" to activate
tell application "System Events"
  tell process "iTunes"
  keystroke "," using command down
  delay 1
  click button "Sharing" of toolbar 1 of window 1 --"Sharing Preferences"
  -- Check the checkbox if it is checked!
  if value of checkbox 1 of group 1 of window 1 is 0 then
  click checkbox 1 of group 1 of window 1
  end if
  click button "OK" of window 1
  end tell
end tell
* after going into System Preferences, Security & Privacy, Privacy tab, and under "Accessibility," checking the box to allow Applescript Editor.app to control the computer
If you've never used applescript before, you can make a single Applescript with both your Unix commands and this, just by prepending the Unix command with "Do shell script" (without quotes) and whatever you would type.