That's exactly why I didn't discuss sharing a library. It is fraught with problems, and in most cases will result in disaster.

Hhhmmmm... but what if you have your Mac set up with Fast User Switching DISABLED? That way, there's no possibility that two users will be modifying the same iTunes Music Library at the same time? In my family, all four of us are using my iTunes account. It seems that, as long as I have Fast User Switching unchecked, we could all use the same music folder. Yes? If I'm on to something, maybe one additional paragraph for "If all users are purchasing on the same iTunes account AND you have Fast User Switching UN-checked, then you can all use the same music folder!" Or, you could just tell me I have a short between the headphones.

In my tests with sharing the library, things weren't that good. First, you need to make sure that the other user has logged out, which can be a problem for some. Second, I kept having permissions problems.

Couldn't you just use the "sync only checked music and videos" trick?

Seems to work for me.

If you uncheck items, say in a playlist, iTunes will skip them when playing things in order. You can still double-click an unchecked item to play it, though.

My iTunes folder is much larger than the internal drive on my iBook. My iTunes folder resides on an external disk. Is there still a way to make this tip work?

I've just set this up for 2 user accounts on my MacBook. But, I'm having problems getting the Album Artwork and Mobile Applications folders in sync between the 2 accounts.

I tried moving both folders to the Shared user folder and creating aliases in the individual user's iTunes folders. For Mobile Applications, iTunes was able to update the file path for the apps to the new location and still sync successfully with my iPhone. But when I tried to download a new app, iTunes gave an error about no being able to find the correct folder.

And the Album Artwork folder was worse - the alias setup wouldn't even let iTunes see the downloaded art anymore.

So for now, I've just duplicated these 2 folders on the 2nd user account. But I'd really like to figure out a way to get these 2 folders shared between the 2 users. I'm tempted to try hard links, but this sounds dangerous.

Any advice?