ITunes on networked drive

My household is networked via some Windows NT protocol. I'm the only one in my house who uses a Mac. There is a share which has our music on it (ripped from discs we own, every piece of it legal as church on Sunday).
I can get to the share with the music just fine. I can put all of the songs in an iTunes library, assuming I'm patient -- about 20G of music, and it takes forever and ever, but it can be done. Here are my problems.
The person running the music share claims that iTunes "messes up" the files, it rearranges where the files are within the directories, and even mucks around with the directories. Does this happen when I add files? Can I prevent it?
Music is added to the share directly, which means it doesn't go through iTunes to get indexed -- or whatever you call it -- and I don't know about the new music unless someone mentions it or I go looking. Is there any way to get iTunes, under these circumstances, to add new music that I'm not adding to my library.
Finally, is it possible to switch between libraries? I have a library of just my own stuff that no one else cares about on my private external drive. Can I (easily) switch from the one library to the other.
Thank you.

Here are some answers:
1) to avoid iTunes "messing with the folders": Preferences->Advanced (general)->Check OFF "keep iTunes Music folder organized and "Copy files to iTUnes Music folder"
2) No you can't get iTunes to automatically add to your library new music from the network drive.
3) It's not possible to easily swtich between libraries. What you can do however is have access both to the networked songs and the songs on your external drive at the same time. The way an iTunes LIbrary works is that it indexes songs from various locations, they don't all have to be in one location. So do File->Add to Library the folder from your external drive and then you'll be able to see taht music as well as the other music at the same time. THis will not add those files to the network drive.
Lastly, have you considered using the iTunes Music Sharing feature? Enable "share my music" and "look for shared music" on the computers in the Preferences and then you'll see the other comptuers libraries as playlists in your library, It's much simpler than your setup, but it has a few disadvantages, incuding not being able to add the other computers' songs to your iPod.

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Moving iTunes to network drive - Seagate or WD

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If you want to make another drive (direct or portable) on your PC the main music location for iTunes, move all song files there, as well as any future imported music from CDs, here is one method (see the links below):
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See these links for some step-by-step info:
iLounge: Moving your iTunes Library to a New Hard Drive
MacMuse: iTfW: Move iTunes music/Library to new drive
iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder
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Welcome to the Forums, Scott!
You can add a folder of music to iTunes by pressing Command-O or going to iTunes-> Add To Library...
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Okay, so I have a powermac and a macbook pro and until now I've had copies of my music library on each but the MBP drive could use a little cleaning so I want to dump the itunes music from there and then connect to the powermac over the network.
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2. Adding a song or changing my library on one or the other computer reflects on both.

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I have an ipod nano that won't sync through itunes when network drives are mapped.
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Hi win,
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93499
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I appreciate your input and I think you're right about this being impossible. But just to clarify, you say I can't "have multiple machines accessing the same music files from a shared location." I can have multiple machines accessing the same music files from a shared location--I just can't have them accessing the same music files simultaneously--which may have been what you meant. For my situation, I think it will be less work to just quit iTunes on my server when I want to run it on my client (using Chicken of the VNC). It's not ideal, but it's less time-consuming than periodically syncing three computers.
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turingtest2 wrote:
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tt2
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Iomega network drive no longer connects under iTunes 10.5 - lost access to all my songs. Anyone else having problems with iTunes 10.5 / IOS 5?

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FYI: It seems it was a network problem with my WinXP PC. After complete deletion and new installation of XP and iTunes my iPhone will be recognized correctly, Wifi synchronization works (mostly) fine.

Itunes can't find network drive on boot, but fine after

I have a MacMini server for my house providing light control, emal, websites and other fun stuff.   As it is on 24x7 it made sense to put the iTunes library here as well and have my primary workstation simply connect to it. As the MacMini is in a closet I really need the primary workstation as the point of connection for all iPads and iPhones.
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On a whim, I tested the remote library with my MacBook Pro.
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The MacBook is on wireless.
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Anyone have any thoughts??

Can an iTunes Media folder be on a LAN network drive?

That is, remote from the Mac on which the library is managed, but (obviously) on the same LAN.
When "Copy files to iTunes Media folder" is set, and I import a CD via the managing mac, will the files land up on the network drive or into the iTunes folder on the managing Mac?

By organizing it should both relocate all current media as well as start using the new location from that point on. You're mostly okay there. Where you are not okay is iTunes doesn't look at your files directly. It only really looks at one single file, the iTunes Library.itl file which tells it where everything is located. You need to get both copies of iTunes using the same complete library (media + library file). The way you do that is using the option start method. You should only need to do that once unless for some reason the library storage drive is disconnected when starting iTunes, in which case iTunes will use the default location and you will need to option start again.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391
iTunes 9 [and later]: Understanding iTunes Media Organization - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3847
By the way, both copies of iTunes will have to be the same version or the library will become unreadable to the older iTunes.
There are variants to the above but I am not going to type in all the possibilities unless you say something that tells me you need a different structure.

ITunes Media folder organization on a network drive

I have a problem with a strange behaviour of iTunes media folder organization on my network drive.
Option "keep iTunes Media folder organized" is enabled.
If the Media folder is on a local drive or the Media folder is replaced by an alias pointing to a folder on an external drive it works correctly.
(Correctly means subfolders like "music" are generated by iTunes.)
But if the Media folder is an alias that points to a networkdrive directly (instead of pointing to a folder in that drive) iTunes does not create the subfolders anymore.
What is the reason for that behaviour, how can it be fixed?

Thanks for the feedback, but with the iPhone (I use the calendar feature a lot), synchronising just became a very common event, and perpetual re-connecting will drive me insane.
I guess I will just live with what we have until the folks at Apple figure it out;

ITunes media folder on network drive

Hi Everyone,
My plan is to store my media files in a folder on a network drive, and then have itunes pull from that network directory to located media. On two of my machines, I changed the media folder to the directory on the network drive. I had itunes consolodate the files, and copy all the files from each machine onto the network directy. At this point, I was expecting to see all media files from both computers in each itunes library, however, this is not the case. Instead, only the files that were originally stored on their respective machines are displayed in each library, as opposed to one library showing all files now on the one network directory. Is there a way to have itunes refresh itself so that it can see the files in the network directory that I have designated as the media folder? Thanks in advance.

Was the library database stored or backed up to the networked drive? If so you can hold down shift as you start iTunes to reconnect to the database, otherwise you'll have to rebuild the library with the content.
See How to open an alternate iTunes Library file or create a new one.
For the future see this backup User Tip.
tt2

ITunes on networked drive

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