sharing Itunes library(but not the easy way)

[DTH]

Hello,

I currently have a Windows PC with a lot of disk space and a decent audio card situated near my home stereo. I do not currently use Itunes to play music through the stereo because I prefer foobar. There are several Ipods in my house now, and these are managed via Itunes on two different PCs. Right now each PC has an individual Itunes library maintained by adding music from the music server. The music library on the server is very large and is a work in progress.

What I would like to do is have Itunes running on the music server and be able to access/manage one central library from the various PCs in the house and retain the ability to move music to the Ipods. I realize Itunes will let you share your library, but as I am sure you know it will not let you move from the shared library to the Ipod. I have considered pointing all the Itunes to one central "Itunes Music" folder so that they read the same library(xml) file, but I suspect this would cause problems when more than one Itunes is open.

Any ideas on solving this problem or working around it?

 

[Wodgy]

If you don't need to have iTunes running simultaneously on two machines, putting the iTunes library file on your shared volume is fine. iTunes won't let another instance start up once one already has the database open, so things won't get corrupted, but that's not a perfect solution of course. Also, for large libraries, having the iTunes library file on a network drive is noticeably slower than just having the music on a network drive and keeping the iTunes library file local.

You may consider this program:
http://www.supersync.com/
It's not exactly what you need, but it may satisfy. There are a few other programs that do parts of what you want, but not all of it.

Another option, since you prefer Foobar anyway, is just forget about iTunes and manage the music files yourself on the network share. Use one of the various programs like Anapod to drag and drop files to your iPod from any machine that has access to the network share, rather than using iTunes.

 

[DTH]

Thanks for the response, that was very helpful, I had not considered Anapod. I was hoping to not have to learn(and teach my wife) any new tricks but I suppose I have to suck it up and dive deeper into Anapod, Foobar etc.

Anapod seems pretty easy. But what I really want is a GUI to my music files that will let me do playlists on the PC and drag to the ipod, while maintaining a music library accessible from the network. Or to be able to mount the iPods across the network(the music server is not very easy to get to). I know I need to do my homework, but if anyone can point me to the preferred foobar add ons that might be useful in this quest I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[Wodgy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DTH /img/forum/go_quote.gif Thanks for the response, that was very helpful, I had not considered Anapod. I was hoping to not have to learn(and teach my wife) any new tricks but I suppose I have to suck it up and dive deeper into Anapod, Foobar etc. Anapod seems pretty easy. But what I really want is a GUI to my music files that will let me do playlists on the PC and drag to the ipod, while maintaining a music library accessible from the network. Or to be able to mount the iPods across the network(the music server is not very easy to get to). I know I need to do my homework, but if anyone can point me to the preferred foobar add ons that might be useful in this quest I would greatly appreciate it.

I don't know of any way to get iTunes to mount an iPod across the network. On a Mac you would expect to be able to mount the disk image across the network, but that actually won't work, because iTunes uses the USB device ID to identify the iPod. Any software that did across-network mounting would have to basically fake a device driver.