How To Use The Same iTunes Library On A Home Network
January 25th, 2007 • Filed Under
I bookmarked earlier this week what I thought was a good tip from Lifehacker, as it was going to solve a problem I wanted to solve with my iTunes music. Lifehacker gave very detailed and fairly complex instructions on how to share a iTunes library on a home network, so that the files can be shared and also ratings, artwork, playlists etc
Luckily, I didn’t implement the tip until today as one of Lifehacker’s reader posted an even simplier way to share iTunes music between PCs on a home network. All you have to do is the following:
- On your the PC that holds all your music, navigate to the folder containing your iTunes library file. If you haven’t changed this, then this will be found in My Documents\My Music\iTunes. In there you should see a file called
iTunes Library.itl. - You now need to share this folder on your home network. To do this right-click on the folder and select ‘Sharing and Security’ and tick both ‘Share this folder on the network’ and ‘Allow network users to change my files’
- Now here comes the clever bit. On the the PCs where you want to access your iTunes library, start iTunes as normal but hold down the shift button.
- The screen above will appear . Click on ‘Choose library’ and navigate to the folder you shared in step 2 and select the
iTunes Library.itlfile in that folder. - Repeat steps 3 and 4 on any other PCs you want to share your iTunes library on
Now what will happen is when you launch iTunes on any PC at home it will access the same library file, which means not only will all your personal settings be displayed, but any changes will also be saved.
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- Filed Under: MP3 & Videos
- Tags: Tags: iTunes, lifehacker, mp3, Mp3 amp Videos, music
at last i'll be able to watch footie for free so i can get rid of sky sports cheers man ...
Hmmm nice, but i am using net with 64kbps. Will this work for me.... 
This doesn’t work, because the itunes Library.itl file has hard-coded pathnames to the music files, so itunes will likely be looking for your music in c:\documents and settings\…, but it’s not there, because c:\ is on your local computer, not the remote. You have to go through some machinations to get the music at the same location no matter what computer you use.
it most definitely does work as I was using this tip quite happily myself
i follow EVER step perfectly and it says on the main computer that the files are being shared but when im on the computer im trying to GET THE FILES TO i cant find the files im trying to share, where the hell do i look. HI Cy!
Hi I have tried this it works nearly perfect the only problem is that when I opened iTunes from one PC, next time I open iTunes from another computer it does not found the library file so every time I have to point it it out, when I start iiTunes, any one knows why ?
doesnt itunes already come with this feature? to share your music under preferences? or is this something else? i dont get it…
iTunes let you share other libraries from other PCs on your network. This lets you use the same library on different PCs eg when the files are stored on a network drive/share