Setting up different ipod models/owners on same computer

Question

My husband has an ipod shuffle. I just purchased an ipod nan. We are both new. We have most different taste in music but there is some overlap.
What's the best way to organize our itune libraries? should we have separate libraries (how do you do that) or should we share but then do both ipods get all music. We don't know how to define mine and his stuff.
Thank you

Answer 1

Everybody has different preferences--whether to let the player load automatically or do more hands-on manual syncs. Here's how I do it for two minis, a nano and a shuffle. I have all of these players set to update manually. I have a very large library (over 31,000 songs and I like to have everything in one library so when I search for a song I know immediately whether or not I own it). The owners of the various players in my house make playlists of songs they want on their players. (We keep all of their playlists in Folders with their names on them.) When we want to update the music on the player, we plug the player into the computer--make sure iTunes recognizes it--and then pull the new playlist on top of the player and let it sync. If we want to delete songs, you'll see everything on the player when it's plugged in and you can delete songs that way. There is a way to tell the player to sync only checked songs--so I think you can uncheck playlists and the songs will be removed during the update process but I've never tried this so I don't know if it actually works. Since Nanos, Shuffles, and Minis don't hold very much music--it's pretty easy to manually delete songs that I no longer want on the player.
For my shuffle especially, I usually erase everything and start with totally new music every time I sync.