Newbie – Itunes Limitations due to the nature of the beast?

@jbirney wrote:

Hi folks,

I have tried to figure this out on my own but apparently not that good of a searcher of the net 🙂

I have 3 itunes users at my house, wife, son and myself. Things were going long ok until one day I noticed we had acatually paid for the same songs more than once so both her and jr could listen to that song. She did not know how to get the files over to his PC and I was away, so she just paid for the songs twice to and jr downloaded them again from the apple store. I was kind of bumbed out as we should not have to do that (as your suppose to be able to play a song you purchased on 5 pcs). But that highlighted a need. I needed to educate them on file sharing or find a better way.

Better way I thought was getting DNS-323. We did and movied all of our family pictures, game files, music ect over and life was better. No more buying the same songs twice as both can now see the music via the shared folder. I also wrote a script that would “harvest” all of their itunes music by making a copy of a new songs to the nas 🙂 It took some time but I finally got all of the music sorted and duplicates removed. Life is good 🙂 Then I upgraded the NAS to make use of Firefly. Now life is really good as I have been very impressed with it (nice work folks).

Finally the question: My wife notices that there is no way to add a song from the DNS-323 Firefly shared music to her library so she can then add it to her ipod. And she is right. Is there any easy way around that (via a plugin, ect)? I realize this can be used for bad things, but we are only using it on our lan network to play all the songs we purchased and or ripped from our CDs. All of our PCs have been authroized so there I feel it still should fall under fair use.

I do realize that I can add all of the songs via the nas to the library of each machine, then have then make playlist and sync custom play list to their IPODs. But that seems like its over kill. And I am pretty sure this is a known feature of Itunes to stop stealing of music.

Also this is related but not that important. The right click getinfo menu selection does not work the same nor does the show duplicates which is useful if your trying to find duplicates 🙂 Any way around that besides just adding all of the songs to your lib?

Thanks again for your time. Sorry to go into all the details but figured it would help to understand what we are trying to do.

Short answer is no, there isn’t really a fix for that. That’s kind of the nature of the beast.

That said, there are a couple ways to work around it. The way *I* work around it is that I have one “master” iTunes library. that’s where I add everything. Whenever I rip a new album, I do it at one particular machine. That machine syncs up to my nas on a scheduled job. I use rsync on a mac, but on windows you could use unison (I’ve used it before, seems to work well on windows networks).

I used to sync the “master” library to my other machines. I meant I lost local playlists and stuff, but it worked well enough.

Since iTunes 7, I actually open one shared copy of the iTunes library using the “press option on start” that lets you connect to a remote library. I assume there is a keypress on Windows for that too.

Aside from those, which have limitations (multiple people using it at once, etc), there are some iTunes syncronizing programs. iTunes Library Updater is one, and there are others.

I guess all of them have compromises, it’s just a matter of what compromises you are willing to tolerate. 🙂