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The permissions issues cited in the last section only apply to iTunes' proprietary binary catalog file, which isn't reasonable to share anyway. The media collection itself is trivial to share. We've done it for years in my house without incident; the media are on a drive hanging off an Airport base station, accessed by multiple machines.

bastion, on 24 February 2012 - 07:00 AM, said:

Right, and that's _not_ in the Share folder (/Users/Shared). That folder has special permissions issues. If you're sharing on a drive, then those issues don't apply.

I want to move my backups .. they are taking a lot of space..Can u tell if i can do it??

Is there any way to move the Mobile Applications file to cloud storage to sync with multiple computers? I have four computers and I would like to avoid constantly updating the Apps on each one.

kirkmc, on 24 February 2012 - 07:40 AM, said:

Having the media folder in /Users/Shared works fine.

bastion, on 24 February 2012 - 08:53 AM, said:

For a single user, yes. But there are oddities that occur when different users put files there.

kirkmc, on 24 February 2012 - 10:35 AM, said:

Also for multiple users.

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Before moving the common library out to the network drive we had it shared from /Users/Shared on my desktop, whence it was accessed and manipulated by multiple local and remote accounts. My wife still does this; she keeps a subset of our media collection in /Users/Shared on her notebook for use when travelling. She maintains two accounts on that machine - one for work and one for leisure activities - and manages that local collection from both at whim/need.

Can you describe these oddities my family has somehow avoided for all this time? Maybe I'll be able to figure out *how* we've avoided them and then share the information here to benefit others. Seems a better course than just the two of us arguing back and forth about whether nebulous problems exist.

bastion, on 24 February 2012 - 07:00 AM, said:

If one user puts a file in /Users/Shared, other users can't delete it. That leads to lots of problems. Though if you have the other users logging it with your user ID, that wouldn't be an issue. Is that what you do?

Also, the problem with putting an iTunes library there is that, if the actual library file is there, only one person can access it at a time. If it's not there, then each user has to figure out what new content to add to their library.

Re - Using iTunes Match for Sharing and the points in your last paragraph. I tried to minimise the use of bandwidth when I turned on Match on two computers.

I "Matched" the largest library first. I checked for low quality matched songs that also existed on the second computer. I upgraded my low quality songs by deleting and downloading from iCloud. I then imported these songs on the second computer and deleted the low quality versions. The second computer now contained upgraded songs but without having iTunes Match on.

When I turned on "Match" on the second computer I expected all the recently imported songs to get a match- since they had been downloaded from the cloud on the first computer (Hope you're following this). Not so. About 5% missed and were uploaded. I now have a few songs on the second computer that have Kind = Matched AAC but iCloud Status is "Uploaded". Strange.

So; the same song - exactly the same song - may be matched with the version in the cloud on one computer, but may not be matched on another computer. Slightly off topic, but interesting I thought.

kirkmc, on 24 February 2012 - 11:44 AM, said:

No, and I'm not at home right now but I have a theory. The thing is that we don't have the "artist" folders right in /Users/Shared/. We've got a folder called Music, and inside that is the hierarchy that iTunes manages. The permissions on that folder are what matter; not the permissions on /Users/Shared itself.

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The catalog/database/whatever file doesn't have to be in the same place as the media collection, though. From what I've seen and heard, there are also permission problems on that file specifically no matter where it lives because of how iTunes maintains it. For my purposes that's not an issue because I'm of the opinion that it's simply a bad idea to share it among multiple people anyway. Reasonable for my wife to want one database used by both accounts when she's using her local subset, but when she's using the full share and my daughter and I both are, too, you *want* different libraries for everyone. Yes, there's some inconvenience in terms of discovering new things to add - I'm trying to find time to polish up my solution to that and release it as freeware - but by sharing the database you're going to be compromising some of iTunes' more interesting user-oriented functionality.

LancashireWitch, on 24 February 2012 - 11:57 AM, said:

That's interesting. I see no logic to why certain tracks match and others don't, and I've seen people report different tracks from a same album matching or not.

Really appreciate this column, thanks! Also, thanks to the intelligent readers who commented in the thread...

My iTunes library resides on our iMac in my account. How can I share this library with myself on my Macbook Pro Laptop? Ken