ITunes as Household's only music source

Question

Me and my family recently decided to take all our CD's and import them into a newly bought MacMini. On this MacMini we have 6 user accounts. One of these account we call MusicMaster. We import all CD's into this account's iTunes Library. We arranged it so that the tracks are all stored in a shared folder.
We want it to be possible to access all the music from all user accounts. And also from my wife's and my iBook's. Basically that's all we need in terms of music playing.
So, we went into each account on th MacMini and changed the iTunes Music Folder Location to where the MusicMaster account is located. We unticked the "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library" because we only want one copy of the music library. Then we clicked the "Add to library from the file menu and selected the shared folder where the music is located.
Everything works great so far. We can even play the music from out iBooks. This means that at the same time someone in the family is playing rock over Airportexpress-1, I play jazz on Airportexpress-1 and my wife is playing blues on Airportexpress-2.
Now to the question:
When we import a new CD into Musicmasters iTunes Library, it's not appearing int the other user accounts iTunes programs. Suddenly everything seems kind of unpleasant. How do we achieve this. Could someone please help me?

Answer 1

Welcome to the discussions!
In the way you currently have it set up, each user would need to "add to library" for the new songs added to the Musicmasters account. Each account has their own library.
I suggest two changes to the setup:
1. In each user's "Music" folder, place an alias of the Musicmasters iTunes folder and delete the current iTunes folder. This will cause iTunes to recognize the shared folder as the user's master library instead of having their own.
2. Tick the "copy files to iTunes..." selection. This will allow any account to add songs to the library (if you want to give everyone this capability).
The only potential downside to this is that the playcount, ratings, etc. will be the same for all accounts. If this is an issue, then the way you have it set up is fine - but each user will need to manually add any music in the master library.
Hope this helps.