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iTunes - using a network folder as source


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With the introduction of a laptop, my wife and I would like to use the laptop to manage our iTunes music. The problem is, the hard drive is too small.

 

I've got a network set up at home, and I wanted to share my 'My Music' folder and map it as a drive on the laptop, but I've learned that you can't share folders under a specific user's profile.

 

This means I'll have to move my iTunes Library to another folder on my PC. No biggie - I have instructions for doing that (and ensuring that my playlists and ratings are intact) - but I'm not sure whether iTunes will let me point to a network drive. And I don't know what effect (if any) this has on purchasing music from the iTunes store.

 

I'm 100% sure other people are doing stuff like this. I just need to be let in on the secret.

 

When I have a little more time, I'll scour the 'net for some instructions, but in the meantime, if anyone here is doing this, I sure wouldn't mind some pointers.

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At home, I have one PC holding our music, and it's accessed by another two PCs - one of which uses iTunes. Make sure the folder is shared (duh), and in iTunes, you just select it like you would any other folder.

 

That's it.

 

Makes no difference with iTunes purchased music - it can happily sit on a network share. I don't know about accessing purchased music from different computers though as I've never needed to.

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At home' date=' I have one PC holding our music, and it's accessed by another two PCs - one of which uses iTunes. Make sure the folder is shared (duh), and in iTunes, you just select it like you would any other folder.

 

That's it.

 

Makes no difference with iTunes purchased music - it can happily sit on a network share. I don't know about accessing purchased music from different computers though as I've never needed to.[/quote']

 

Thanks for the info. I *think* you can have 5 PC's with access to purchased music. I'll be finding out as I try this in the future.

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Thanks for the info. I *think* you can have 5 PC's with access to purchased music. I'll be finding out as I try this in the future.

 

This is correct. You can have up to 5 machines authorized to listen to music purchased from a given ITMS account. Make sure you de-authorize any machines that you sell or otherwise part from, because you can't get those authorizations back.

 

DRM sucks.

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OK,

I've moved my library, set up a mapped drive on my laptop.

 

I installed iTunes on the laptop, and told it where my iTunes music folder is - on the mapped drive. I even imported my library (the xml file) and I see all my playlists.

 

The problem is, none of the songs show in my library, with one exception: If I browse through my music folder and play it in iTunes, it will show in my library.

 

I don't want to have to play through 5800 songs to get them to show up in my library.

 

Any ideas?

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Any ideas?

 

Good call on the XML file, it's needed to retain metadata (like ratings) and playlists.

 

As far as getting it to see your songs, try dragging the folder containing all your music into the iTunes window. You may want to try this with a single artist, or limited number of tracks just to test it. If it works you can drag the entire folder it, iTunes will look down into folders to find all the tracks.

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As far as getting it to see your songs, try dragging the folder containing all your music into the iTunes window. You may want to try this with a single artist, or limited number of tracks just to test it. If it works you can drag the entire folder it, iTunes will look down into folders to find all the tracks.

 

This is working, but taking WWAAAAYYYY too long. I can't figure it out. It says it's "copying", but when I choose 'get info' for one of the tracks, I can see it's right where it should be.

 

I wonder what's taking so long.

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I've done this before (on a Mac) and it takes ~5-10 minutes for several thousand songs. What I think it does is gather all the tag info, and check the directory structure (if you have it set to let iTunes organize the files)

 

Hmmm, it's taken a lot longer than that for me. ~3 hours for 75 songs.

 

I've got some kind of problem. I'll get deeper into it later when I have more time.

 

Thanks for the replies.

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