I want to know if it is possible for my Macbook Pro and my XP desktop to use the same iTunes library.
I have an XP desktop that acts as, among other things, my media server. All the other computers in my house pull music and video from the XP box - it has a lot of storage for that purpose. This works great 99% of the time. My wife and I both have mac notebooks, with our own iTunes libraries that sync with our iPods - but the music files themselves are stored on the XP box and played over the network.
Sometimes I use the XP box for more than fileserving, though - for example, I play XP only games on it. I run into problems if I want to listen to music while I'm doing that, though. All the music files themselves are on the XP box, of course, so I could play them with any player. I'd like to play them with iTunes though, and have access to my playlists, ratings, etc. In other words, I'd like the copy of iTunes on my Mac and PC to point to the same library. Is this possible?
I found this article, which claims to give instructions for doing exactly what I want:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070424081346722
I have the same problem one of the commenters pointed out, though - once I rename the "iTunes Library" file to the "iTunes Library.itl" that Windows expects, it's greyed-out and unselectable as a library on the mac.
Maybe more problematic is the fact that the file paths in the library are all wrong from the point of view of my XP box, so it can't find any of the files, even though they are on a local drive. I need some way to globally change the path to the music files for the whole library.
A partial solution is to share my Mac library and play that from the PC copy of iTunes. But this doesn't record my play counts and it seems rube-goldbergian to send music from the XP box's drive across the network to my mac, then BACK across the same network to the PC when I play it.
Has anyone had luck with a similar setup?
tyia.
I have an XP desktop that acts as, among other things, my media server. All the other computers in my house pull music and video from the XP box - it has a lot of storage for that purpose. This works great 99% of the time. My wife and I both have mac notebooks, with our own iTunes libraries that sync with our iPods - but the music files themselves are stored on the XP box and played over the network.
Sometimes I use the XP box for more than fileserving, though - for example, I play XP only games on it. I run into problems if I want to listen to music while I'm doing that, though. All the music files themselves are on the XP box, of course, so I could play them with any player. I'd like to play them with iTunes though, and have access to my playlists, ratings, etc. In other words, I'd like the copy of iTunes on my Mac and PC to point to the same library. Is this possible?
I found this article, which claims to give instructions for doing exactly what I want:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070424081346722
I have the same problem one of the commenters pointed out, though - once I rename the "iTunes Library" file to the "iTunes Library.itl" that Windows expects, it's greyed-out and unselectable as a library on the mac.
Maybe more problematic is the fact that the file paths in the library are all wrong from the point of view of my XP box, so it can't find any of the files, even though they are on a local drive. I need some way to globally change the path to the music files for the whole library.
A partial solution is to share my Mac library and play that from the PC copy of iTunes. But this doesn't record my play counts and it seems rube-goldbergian to send music from the XP box's drive across the network to my mac, then BACK across the same network to the PC when I play it.
Has anyone had luck with a similar setup?
tyia.
