iTunes: How do you handle multiple people's music preferences?

[Polerius]

For those of you who have more than one person with an iDevice in the house (iPod/iPhone/iPad), how do you handle people’s different music tastes when syncing the devices? e.g. the husband, wife, son, daughter will have different songs they like, though there may be some overlap.

One way is to set everything to ‘manual sync’, but that means that you have to drag and drop every song/album you like (and do this for every new song that gets added to the common library)

Do you guys have an automated way of using a shared iTunes library, but keeping different songs on different devices?

Or do you just have different iTunes libraries and sync each device to its respective library? (If yes, how do you handle buying new songs? Do you just copy the song to all the libraries?)

[One_And_Only_Wanderers]

you could use play lists and only synch your lists

[Turek]

@Polerius

Or do you just have different iTunes libraries and sync each device to its respective library? (If yes, how do you handle buying new songs? Do you just copy the song to all the libraries?)

I don’t have multiple people, so this is just how I’d do it in theory:

All songs go in the common library. Each user has their own playlist (or playlists). Each device is set to only sync only the playlists the owner wants on their device. Each person is responsible for adding any songs in the “Purchased” playlist to their playlist if they want it.

[heathen_earthling]

My method for syncing on my girlfriend’s computer: highlight and delete practically all the songs from iTunes (but opt to keep the files), add all the songs I want, plug in the iPod and let it sync, and then put everything back the way it was when I’m done.

This “playlist” concept could be a time-saver, yes…

[Doug_K]

Ideally you should have a different login for each user. That way you have your own iTunes library, your wife has her own, etc. etc.

Next best would be to go into the device settings for each iPod and check “Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres” in the music tab. Then you can set up rules for which music goes on which iPod.

[UncleRojelio]

@Doug_K

Ideally you should have a different login for each user. That way you have your own iTunes library, your wife has her own, etc. etc.

This is it. Plus, you set each user to use the same Music directory. Works like a charm.

[Mama_Zappa]

@Doug_K

Ideally you should have a different login for each user. That way you have your own iTunes library, your wife has her own, etc. etc.

Next best would be to go into the device settings for each iPod and check “Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres” in the music tab. Then you can set up rules for which music goes on which iPod.

The downside of this is that if they buy music that you might like, you don’t have automatic access to it.

The way we work around this is by putting the music itself in a standalone directory on the C drive, then the “library” info (all the metadata) is tied to the individual computer users. Periodically I’ll go into each family member’s user and do an import into iTunes, which identifies everything that is missing and sets up the metadata to point to it.

It’s actually easier to do it with the single-user, playlist version but I don’t want my kids with access to the Parents user (this caution paid off earlier this year when my daughter’s user got a bad case of computer clap, and her lack of admin rights kept it from doing a lot more damage).