[Duke_Thomas]

In reply to:

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before following these directions i went ahead and moved the itunes music folder back to the default location user -> music -> itunes -> itunes music. at that point there were default settings on everything.

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No, because if there were default settings then it would have worked.
If both users are able to make changes without seeing the other's changes, then they're not sharing the same library. The second user perhaps still has his iTunes library file set to be somewhere other than his ~/Music/iTunes folder. If the second user gets "permission denied" errors when he tries to import, then he does not have write access to the music folder.
It's not like my instructions are doing anything actually complicated.

[BigFatDuck]

other than just working, is there anything i can go back and check to see if things were changed correctly? and if indeed i forgot to move something back (although i made a point to move things back to default) is this something i can go back and start over?
i've got a laptop i'm going to try it on now..... i'll let you know how it goes. i want to say that i appreciate your help so far and i'm not implying that your method doesn't work. i've always considered myself good with computers until i moved to mac and am trying to do things that aren't out of the box functional in OS X.

[BigFatDuck]

i just followed these instructions on my laptop and made absolutely sure to return everything to default (user->music->itunes->itunes 4 music library:itunes music:itunes music library xml) for each user. after being very careful to follow your instructions exactly everything seems to be working except user A gets the error message that he doesn't have sufficient privileges to import music. this is, btw, the user who was the original owner of the itunes folder that is now being shared. ???

[BigFatDuck]

i went and changed the ownership of the itunes folder (now located in User A -> Public) and all it's contents to "system" and everything seems to be working perfectly (PHEW!) on the laptop. now i just need to go into the desktop and figure out what went wrong. should i just manually move the files back to where they should be by default at this point (after already changing the things in the terminal per your instruction) and try the terminal actions again? if not, what can be done to fix the desktop at this point?

[Duke_Thomas]

Hmmm.
As a preliminary, you can check to make sure all users that you want to share are part of the musicshare group. For example, id -Gn thomas will list out all the groups that I belong to -- replace with your own short names of course. If musicshare does not appear in this list for any user, then the group is set up incorrectly and you should go into Netinfo Manager and add the user to the musicshare group.
Ah, I see your second post now. Apparently that is not the problem, with your laptop at least. Keep it in mind for the desktop.
Did you happen to get any "permission denied" errors or anything similar during any of the steps I listed? If you did, that could be problematic as something that was supposed to happen didn't.
You get the error that your user doesn't have sufficient privileges to import into iTunes. I have never heard of that error before, but I am going to assume that it means that iTunes cannot write the imported files to some part of the iTunes music folder that it thinks that it has to. Do you have a different interpretation of the error? Anyway, there's a way to test for this.

code:
find ~/Public/iTunes ! -user $USER ! -perm -0060 

    -or ! -perm -0600 -or -type d ! -perm -0110

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The above command will list any files or directories in the iTunes folder that are (1) not owned by you and not are group readable or writable (so you could not modify them), OR (2) owned by you but you can't read or write to them (which would just be wacky), OR (3) is a directory and cannot be opened either by the owner or the group (wacky). If the command returns nothing, then there is no trouble along these lines. If the command returns a few paths, then that may be a source of trouble, but not necessarily.
AGH. I see your THIRD post now. Apparently that was the issue, but it no longer is. I need to type faster. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Well, the upshot is you can try a few of these things on the desktop.
Edit: make sure to run that find command above as the user sharing the music if you test this on the desktop.

[BigFatDuck]

ok trying to get the desktop working now. both users are members of the musicshare group and i didn't notice any kind of errors while following your directions in the terminal. User A is the person whose music folder i've decided to use, and that apparently has been moved to User A -> Public. there's now a shortcut of that itunes folder in User A -> Music, but User B doesn't have a similar shortcut... instead has an "original" itunes folder with itunes music library and the xml file, nothing else. however, user B's itunes preference is pointing to the new public itunes music location. from this, i assume i just need to create a link from the public -> itunes to be in user B's music folder. i think i probably forgot to move the original itunes folder out of user B's music folder before creating the link.
question- after this process in itunes preferences should it be looking at the music library directly from user A -> public -> itunes, or should it be changed so that it's looking at the new link located in each users music folder? and did you not have to change your settings so that the public music folder was set to system owner? it seems like that made all the difference on the laptop. shrug
edit: and one more thing- is there a quick/easy way to change permissions for everything in the itunes folder to read/write everyone and system owner? this way as each user imports new music thus adding things to the library that the other user can't edit, i could just change permissions in a batch sort of way so that any music imported up to that point would be able to be edited by both users. for some reason selecting to "apply to enclosed items" when changing permissions doesn't usually work in my case- if i change the itunes folder permissions and select "apply to enclosed items" many, if not all, it's contents remain unchanged (i'll still have artist folders with ownership to one or the other user with read only permissions set for the other user).

[Duke_Thomas]

In reply to:

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but User B doesn't have a similar shortcut ... i think i probably forgot to move the original itunes folder out of user B's music folder before creating the link.

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That's likely. Note, if Music/iTunes does not exist as a symbolic link for all users in the correct location this approach will not work for those users. User B has retained the separate library.

In reply to:

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from this, i assume i just need to create a link from the public -> itunes to be in user B's music folder.

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Not in user B's music folder. Rather, you need to move user B's music folder elsewhere out of the way, and create the link where the music folder was.

In reply to:

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question- after this process in itunes preferences should it be looking at the music library directly from user A -> public -> itunes, or should it be changed so that it's looking at the new link located in each users music folder?

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The situation I envisioned was that every user has their music folder set to Music/iTunes, which is the default. However, I believe setting their music folders to this ~A/Public/iTunes folder should be just fine, though I have not experimented with such a set up.

In reply to:

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and did you not have to change your settings so that the public music folder was set to system owner? it seems like that made all the difference on the laptop.

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That problem was due to a false assumption I had made: under my scenario, I had never shared my music, so I already owned everything, so no such change was necessary. You, however, were trying to share a folder that had already been shared (if I read you situation correctly), and I failed to realize that perhaps some items in that folder were already owned by other users. By forcing everything to be owned by user A on the laptop, you forced the ownerships into such a state that my originally false assumption became true. At least, that's what I view as the most likely possibility from perhaps thousands of miles away. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
In other words, instead of the :musicshare token in my original chown command, thomas:musicshare (with your user replacing thomas) probably should have been used instead.

In reply to:

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edit: and one more thing- is there a quick/easy way to change permissions for everything in the itunes folder to read/write everyone and system owner?

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This command will force everything in the iTunes folder to be owner and group readable and writeable.
sudo chmod -R ugrw ~/Music/iTunes/

You know, you could modify the iTunes bundle itself so that something similar runs upon quitting iTunes to ensure that songs a user imported during the last run are given group write access -- but I imagine you've had well beyond your fill of my particular brand of tinkering.

Changing the ownership of items to user A is probably not necessary, as user B is able to access everything just fine even though everything is owned by user A, and has the same priviledges w.r.t. reading and writing. If you want to anyway, you could do something like the following:
sudo chown -R thomas:musicshare ~/Music/iTunes/
Of course, replace thomas with whoever you want to own the music.

Rather than run that, you could save the following Applescript as an app, and just double click if you ever have permission issues.

code:
do shell script "chown -R "${USER}:musicshare" ~/Music/iTunes/;

chmod -R ugrw ~/Music/iTunes/;

find ~/Music/iTunes/ -type d -exec chmod ug+x {} ;" with administrator privileges

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[BigFatDuck]

i also noticed that a lot of my music has permissions set to read/write for "others" as well. what i would like to do, is set permissions for everything in itunes to this:
owner: system
access: read & write
group: musicshare
access: read & write
others: read only
this is because even though both users are supposed to have read/write access one user wasn't able to import until i changed the owner from a particular user to system which seemed to solve the problem and give both users equal access (finally). since i'm clueless about scripts and code for the terminal, can you modify what you've described so that it resets everything in itunes to these permissions everytime i run the script or type the command in the terminal? /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Duke_Thomas]

Okay. After this script is run, the user called "system" and the group called "musicshare" will own everything in the music folder. (I take it system is your special admin user or something.) Everything in this music folder will be readable by everyone, even if they're not in the musicshare group, but will not be able to write anything. "System" and anyone in the "musicshare" group will be the ones able to write. I switched around the format of the script to make it easier to read.

code:
-- This script wipes the slate clean as it were

-- with respect to the music folder permissions.

set changeOwnership to "chown -R system:musicshare ~/Music/iTunes/;"

set changePermissions to "chmod -R ugrw,or,o-w ~/Music/iTunes/;"

set dirAccess to "find ~/Music/iTunes/ -type d -exec chmod ugo+x {} ; ;"

set command to {changeOwnership, changePermissions, dirAccess} as string

do shell script command with administrator privileges

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I'd suggest saving this as an application somewhere, and if you ever run into the permissions problems from iTunes reorganizing the directories or whatever, a double click will force the permissions. Any user with admin access and the symbolic link set up at ~/Music/iTunes should be able to run this script.