Sharing iTunes throughout a house

I am starting to wish Steve Jobs would come up with some sort of weird hybrid Time Machine / Mac mini / Apple TV / Drobo thing, at which point, frankly, he could take my credit card details and charge whatever he felt to be appropriate...but while I wait for that I'd like to ask some advice on the best way to share music and photos through a house.
First, the setup:
Me: PowerBook with 80GB HDD + iPhone
Wife: MacBook with 160GB HDD + iPhone
New Server: Powermac G4 with additional 128GB HDD for media
Optional extra: Windows box
Broadband comes into the house in the lounge where it's piped to the study along a Devolo powerline network - wifi doesn't travel through the house and we had an electrician look into running cat6 under the floor but it's more than we want to spend as there's a ton of insulation under there (we live in a flat).
What I'd like to do is store my music on iTunes in one place so that when I buy a CD, I can load it up and access it from my laptop (and ultimately play it on the stereo, presumably via an Apple TV). This being the real world, my wife and I do not buy two copies of every CD we want on our iPhones, we rip the same CD to our respective libraries. I'd also like to be able to consolidate the various iPhoto libraries so that we can attach the camera in one place and have the photos become available through the house.
This appears to be very much more difficult than it feels like it should be - presumably because of DRM concerns. I've tried setting up a small library on the server and found that I can't sync playlists from it to my iPhone via my Powerbook. I have at least managed to host my own library on the server, which means that I don't have to connect to the external firewire drive which was previously hosting my library ever since I ran out of hard drive space on the powerbook, but obviously this means that a) I've got to add CDs from my Powerbook, not the server and b) when I do, my wife can't use them on her iPhone.
The other problem is that I'd like my wife to be able to listen to my music when my laptop's not on (and ultimately if we get the Apple TV we need that to be able to run without either laptop running).
So...any thoughts welcome. I can't believe I'm the first person to go through this. The only solution I've come up with is pretty clunky, and goes like this:
- set up the Powermac as the master - it has a library and all CDs are loaded there
- continue to maintain three libraries (server, mine, wife's)
- use something like Syncopation to keep the three libraries in sync
The only problem with this is that it means storing three identical libraries, and my wife will run out of space at some point.
The iPhoto question is (I think) easier - is the answer just to run the main iPhoto library on the Powermac and share it out from there? I don't think there are any DRM issues to worry about there but, again, any advice is welcome.
Many thanks in advance

Was your wife logged into the libray at the time you tried to log in? I have had a similar problem and it was because another user was logged into the library when I attempted to. I got the permission denied banner.

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Message was edited by: Gmor

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The easiest thing would be to share the entire music folder, so anyone of you can listen to your music.
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2. Move your yourusername/Music folder to computer/users/shared. (The folder will be copied ONLY in case your using FileVault, so you'd have to delete the original User/Music folder after making sure you'd got a functional copy at computer/users/shared) Select users/shared, press "apple+i" to get the info window, go to "Ownership" change all permissions to "read & write" and hit "apply to enclosed items"
3. In case you're using FileVault, either delete or rename the original Music folder within your own account. Again, not necessary as long as FileVault isn't enabled.
4. Select computer/users/shared/music, hold down "ctrl" while clicking on it and choose "create alias" from the contextual menu. Copy that alias into your homefolder as well as your girlfriend's account (need to log in) and rename it to "music" without the "alias" at the end.
5. Launch iTunes. Done.
6. Don't worry, in case you don't see your music. I've used a slightly different approach, yet this one should work totally fine.
If you want to listen to the same music, yet be able to set up your own playlists, ratings etc.:
For your account:
- go to yourusername/Music/iTunes, move "iTunes Music" to computer/users/shared and change ownership according to #2.
- If FileVault is enabled, check #3. Of course, you want to rename the original "iTunes Music" in this case.
- create an alias for computer/users/shared/iTunes Music and copy the alias to yourusername/Music/iTunes. Rename it to "iTunes Music" without "alias".
- Launch iTunes. Should be working the way it used to. Quit.
For your girlfriend's account:
- log in, copy alias to username/Music/iTunes, rename alias.
- Launch iTunes, go to File-> Add to Library, select username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music, choose.
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The only downside is, only one user at a time can access the music folder, so if you're logged in and running iTunes, you're girlfriend, logged in via fast user switching, won't be able to open iTunes until you quit it for yourself. Haven't found a way around this yet.
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Sharing iTunes throughout a house

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