Share iTunes Media Within All Your Computers

If you have more than one PC in your home and still want to share your media file among your PCs then this must be your choice. However you can make a home server to do this. Setting up one central place to store a household’s media files and access via iTunes makes sense. It will also free up some hard drive space on each computer.

You can use external hard disk for this project but that will be not your best choice. External hard disk need a local host that means a PC should be one every time when you gaining access to the media file. And there is another problem it will suffer when transfer request grow.

So it is better choice to go with network hard drive like the Western Digital My Book World Edition.You gain a major advantage because it simply plugs into an open port on your router and does not require a host computer to be turned onto access the device.

Things Needed:

• A home router (Wi-Fi or wired)
• Computers running the newest version of iTunes
• Network hard drive

To start sharing files

• First, install the network hard drive and connect it with each computer. This info can easily be found in the owner’s manual, and each device varies slightly – some are easier than others.

• From one computer on the local area network, you need to access the new drive and create an iTunes home directory. Normally, on Windows this would be found in userMy DocumentsMy MusiciTunes – but we don’t want it there.

• Create an iTunes folder on the external hard drive – this is where your music will be stored. Now open iTunes and then the preferences panel; you’ll want to specify the new shared network location for the directory you just created. With the My Book World Edition this is automated and the device shows up in the left navigation of iTunes.

Sharing and accessing the music on the external hard drive

• Click on the Sharing tab, there are two options:

Look for shared libraries

Share my library on my local network

• Check both of those options. The first lets you look for others libraries; the second lets the other computers see your libraries. This is the somewhat confusing part, as each individual computer can have its own set of shared library files. For simplicity, I’d suggest sharing all.

• Click on the Advanced tab and now the General tab; note that this is where you set your iTunes Music Folder Location, which should be the external network hard drive you have. Now tick the box that states Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when applying to Library. This will ensure that all new music added to iTunes will be copied into the external hard drive.

Make sure iTunes is installed on all the other computers in your home and replicate these settings. Everything should be good to go now and you can access and play all media stored on the external device from any computer in your home.

If you already have an existing iTunes library
You’ll need to change the Music folder location and move the files over.

• Change this in the Preferences > Advanced > General tab by selecting Change, and then select the folder on the network hard drive.

• Now copy all the files from the existing iTunes directory on your local computer to the network hard drive, ensuring you include the Album Artwork folder as well as the iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml files.

• Paste them into the iTunes folder you created on your network hard drive and verify the move took place before deleting from your local drive.

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[via] Dumb Little Man

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