Mrs. Mustard now has an iPod. We run Windows 7 with separate user accounts. All our music is stored in a folder on an external drive.
Mrs. Mustard does not want to see any Elvis Costello in her iTunes library, and I damn sure do not want to see the soundtrack for Mama Mia. However, we both want Penny Lane in there.
So how do I set it up where we each select, from the single folder, which tracks we want listed within our respective iTunes applications?
Should I download and install a separate iTunes within her account? If not, how does the software know to pull up her tracks and not mine? Will this be automatic because it is opening from within her account?
I hope this is clear; if not, please ask for clarification.
I’m just guessing at this; I’ve not actually tried it, but it should be theoretically possible to install iTunes separately on her user account and set the library location to the same folder. Then, separating your music from hers would have to be a matter of playlists or groupings. Otherwise, you would have to make a completely separate folder for each account, doubling the amount of space your music library takes up, which I think is what you’re trying to avoid?
You’ll also probably have to “authorize” each others accounts in iTunes in order for you both to share songs that were purchased from the iTunes store.
Of course, this is a lot of work to get the same result as just making separate individual playlists or groupings.
IIRC, iTunes keeps a database for each user, separate from the actual music location. Use import to select ‘your’ music from the common location, it will just populate ‘your’ database, leaving the actual files in the shared location. ilounge.com has good articles on this.
We store all our music files in a directory that all users (parents and each kid) can access, but the library file itself, which is an Itunes-specific directory, is stored separately for each user. So if one of us rips a CD, the others don’t automatically see it - but they can manually import it and then it gets noted in their library file.
If you don’t want to see specific songs, you can either skip those folders when doing such an import, or you can uncheck them in your library: you’d still see them if you do that, but you can change settings so they don’t get played on the computer, or added to your playlists.
If you had a common user and library, you would just set up different playlists for syncing to each iPod.
