Sharing One iTunes Library on a iMac and MacBook - Please Help!

I realise that this has probably been answered a million times on this forum, so I apologize in advance. I recently bought an Airport Extreme and connected to my wireless home network, my internet speeds have increased (don't ask me why because I don't know) and I am really happy with the results, I have just one issue which I am hoping to resolve.
I have a iMac in my study, and a MacBook which I use all around the house. I have an external hard drive connected to the AEBS which has all of my files on, including my iTunes music. The problem is, I download music on both computers, and if I download a track or a movie onto the itunes library of one, it doesn't appear on the other computer, even though both iTunes apps are pointing to the same folder on the external hard drive.
The question I have is, how do I make both itunes libraries share the same library, so if I add a song on my mac it will automatically appear on my macbook when i use it next.
Both macs are fully up to date, and running Leopard
Many Thanks
JC

This is really an iTunes question. How do you configure a remote library which updates properly for all clients?
I suggest that you ask in the iTunes discussion area.

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I'm sort of in the same boat. We've got an iMac with separate User Accounts set up and are currently sharing the same iTunes and iPhoto libraries along with streaming them to our Apple TV.
Right now I'm the only one with an iPod, however she'll be getting one in a couple of weeks.
We also just picked up a MacBook yesterday and I'd like to be able to sync certain libraries like iTunes and iPhoto so that no content gets duplicated on either the iMac or MacBook and so that we both have access to the current libraries for each program on our iPods and AppleTV.
I have an external hard drive that I back up the iMac on and I assume I could manually keep things current with that but there's got to be an easier way...that's why these are Macs right?
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Sharing one iTunes library

I have an iTunes library on my iMac and would like to move this to an network drive and have both my iMacs and my MBP share this same library. I have tried a few ways and have had no luck. What steps should I be doing in order to get these results:
Library located on network drive
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No - the appleTV will only show libraries which are exposed through 'home sharing' , which means you have to have an iTunes instance running somewhere, which you can't do on the NAS (you need a Mac or PC somewhere acting as a server, even if the files still live on the NAS). This is different from the DAAP sharing that lets the NAS 'share' the library to you that you can see at the moment.
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The same point applies that you have to be connected to the network, but instead of failing to open and defaulting the library location - you'd just see '!' next to the files as its can't locate the directory associated with the media.

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Hello, I've poked around at some of the posts dealing with sharing one iTunes music library across multiple accounts on the same Mac but it seems like this can only be done if the libary is moved to a shared folder. I realize this can be done but I was trying to share it the way it is described in a post on Apple support (See link below.). That post seemed to imply that you don't have to move the library from its original location (owned by account A, e.g.), rather just make a couple preference changes in the accounts, use fast user switching and voila. That doesn't seem to work. So my question is this: Is the only way to share one iTunes music library across multiple accounts on the same Mac to move it to a shared folder? I'm running 10.4.8 on an Intel iMac. Thanks in advance!
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93195

After reading this and several other related threads, I am becoming thoroughly confused about all of this. I have a situation similar to the one that pokerpal described in the post dated January 7 at 8:06 pm, except that the music files on my system are located on an external hard drive. Everything else is pretty much the same though - I am the admin user (and the main iTunes user and maintainer) and my girlfriend is a standard user who has no music in her own iTunes library. She can see and listen to and make playlists from and sync her iPod with the music in this library from her account, and I can do the same thing, independent of her, from my account. And if I make a change to information within a song, she doesn't see it, and vice versa, and I understand that. What I don't understand is why when I add a song or an album to the music files by importing a CD or downloading something from the iTunes Music Store, she has no way of knowing that unless I tell her, and then she can add it to her library by using the "Add to Library" function. Is there no way of automatically updating her library files to add the new song(s)? We have almost 15,000 songs and videos in that library, and I don't even want to think about what might have to happen if the answer to my question is "no." Interestingly enough, if I put an update to a Word document in the same exact location (on the hard drive), we can update that and pass it back and forth all day - why is that such a difficult task for iTunes to accomplish?
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Hi, I read through this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3753008 and was able to have two users share one itunes library on one computer (yay). However, for the new user, she can't add any music files to her itunes even though I already made sure that she had read/write permissions for the shared folder. Can anyone help? Thanks! (I recently upgraded to mountain lion on a 2009 macbook, if that matters at all. Thanks.)

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One is to manage the songs manually.
With this setting, you can drag and drop songs/playlists etc onto the iPod from iTunes, and also delete and/or edit songs which are currently on the iPod without affecting the iTunes library.
If you wish to keep the convenience of automatic sync, then you could set the iPods to sync with "selected playlists". This setting can be found in the iPod summary screen under the 'music' tab. With this setting, different playlists can be transferred and later deleted from each iPod without affecting any playlists stored in iTunes or the playlists on the other iPods.
Also, on the 'summary' main page you will see the option to "only sync checked items". With this setting selected, if you remove the check marks from any songs in iTunes, they will not be transferred to the iPod. You can restore the check mark if you want to put the songs back on the iPod at a later date.
Be aware that when playing songs in iTunes, any songs that do not have a check mark against them will be skipped over and will not be played.

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I did put this thread in the Airport Extreme forum, but I have moved it here on advice.
I realise that this has probably been answered a million times on this forum, so I apologize in advance. I recently bought an Airport Extreme and connected to my wireless home network, my internet speeds have increased (don't ask me why because I don't know) and I am really happy with the results, I have just one issue which I am hoping to resolve.
I have a iMac in my study, and a MacBook which I use all around the house. I have an external hard drive connected to the AEBS which has all of my files on, including my iTunes music. The problem is, I download music on both computers, and if I download a track or a movie onto the itunes library of one, it doesn't appear on the other computer, even though both iTunes apps are pointing to the same folder on the external hard drive.
The question I have is, how do I make both itunes libraries share the same library, so if I add a song on my mac it will automatically appear on my macbook when i use it next.
Both macs are fully up to date, and running Leopard
Many Thanks
JC

This is really an iTunes question. How do you configure a remote library which updates properly for all clients?
I suggest that you ask in the iTunes discussion area.

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I have Apple TV - hard wired to the TV
All devices are using the latest versions of OSX and IOS
My Iphone syncs with the imac Itunes account
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The itunes account on the Imac is aware my music folder is on the time machine.
My question is - how do i get to use my Itunes account on the Macbook and update playlists and Playcounts on the Iphone and Imac?
I want to be able to play my music on the time machine from any of my apple devices and it update one music Library.
Is there a way i can do this?
Regards and thanks for your time

You can sync your music to each of your devices using the iMac which is referencing the library on your itunes. So all good there. If you want to share the information amongst all your devices then home Sharing will do it. But only if you are in your own network.
If you want to use the same klibrary on your Macbook as your iMac you can point it at the Library on the time capsule.
If you want the content on your Macbook then Home Sharing between computers will let you copy it but it will not copy over playlists etc
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Understanding Home Sharing
Setting up Home Sharing on your Computer
Setting up Home Sharing on your device
Setting up HomeSharing on Apple TV

Sharing one iTunes Library with Fast User Switching

Last year, I started using one MacBook Pro for Office use and Personal Home use, by creating two user accounts on it, and enabling Fast User Switching. I did this when I gave up using two separate desktops macs.
Now I have two rather similar music libraries, taking up too much hard drive space. Once I enabled Music Sharing in my Office iTunes Library, I realized that I could gain access to that Office Music Library when I am on my Personal Home User account. Since my Library on my Office account is the most complete, can I eliminate the iTunes Library on my Personal Home User account, to save hard drive space?
If so, how should I do this?
MBPro17, Pbk17 G4 1.67, Pbk G4 12 1.5, iMac G4, various G4&G5's Mac OS X (10.4.8) Airport Extreme & Express

Glen
Since my Library on my Office account is the most
complete, can I eliminate the iTunes Library on my
Personal Home User account, to save hard drive
space?
Yes.
If so, how should I do this?
Move the iTunes folder in Home/Music on the Personal
Home User Account to the desktop.
Launch iTunes. Unable to locate a library file, it
will create a new one, empty one in a new iTunes
folder at Home/Music.
Connect to your shared library as usual. If
everything is working as expected, trash the iTunes
folder on your desktop.
Regards
TD
My iTunes was created under an admin. user profile that I would like to delete. I created a second profile also with admin privlages but I want to delete the first because I messed up the shortname on the profile. So, if I delete this first profile, will I lose all of my music? Will I lose access to the music?

Multiple users sharing one itunes library

i have multiple users on my mac, but i'd like us all to be able to access the same itunes library. when i go to itunes prefs on one of the other users accounts and redirect their music library to my folder, it says it is doing it, but itunes still goes to their own music folder instead of mine. i can share my library with the sharing pref, but while they can now listen to my music, they still can't use it in imovie. is there any easy way around this problem??
thanks for your help.

I wrote a simple shell script that executes each time a user logs in (well, actually, each time I log in, coz' it's not really applicable to other users). It syncs my work and home addressbooks and iCal calendars to one another.
I named it "sync". Then I read somewhere that if you wanted to make it double-clickable (to launch it from the Finder), I appended a ".command" filename extension (so it's now named "sync.command"). I also did a chmod 755 to that file so that it had execute privileges. Depending on whether you give each user their own copy of this thing, or keep a single copy in, say, the /Users/Shared directory, you may have to play around with chmod. Whatever, just so long as the user that has just logged in has execute permissions to the file, and to the entire path to the file, you should be good.
Then, in SysPrefs > Accounts > Login Items, I added that "sync.command" file to the list. So, really the only difference is I'm not wrapping mine inside an Automator script like you are.
I had tried adding it to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and make a launchd plist for it, that would kick it off at login. But I didn't get that to work. Don't know why. But just adding the double-clickable executable unix script to the Login Items list did the trick. Whether the plist has to hang out there with it, I don't know. I still have it there, though, in case I ever get motivated to figure out what's wrong with my launchd plist file. So, if just adding it to the Login Items list doesn't do it for you, you could try making a (functional?) launchd plist for it and plopping them both in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, too. That's how I am now, and, like I said, it launches at user login as that user's process (not as a root process like the above referenced article said how login hooks worked -- although, you may want it to run as root since you want this to work with multiple users...in which case, you might want to listen to Cole and not me...).

Sharing One iTunes Library on a iMac and MacBook - Please Help!

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