Incredibly basic iPod/iTunes question

January 4, 2006 7:10 AM

Incredibly basic iPod/iTunes question

I have a whole bunch of music that I loaded onto iTunes and have on my iPod. Now my wife wants to load her (different) music on the computer and possibly listen to them on a (different) iPod. How do I get two different directories that will load onto two different iPods without cross-contamination? (That is, although I love her dearly, I don't want to listen to her music, nor she mine.)

More generally, is there a Net page or book I could read that explains iTunes's features more generally?

posted by Mr. Justice to computers & internet (8 comments total)

The easiest way to let her have her own iTunes library (and her own desktop, bookmarks and document folders) is to give her her own account and enable Fast User Switching.
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:14 AM on January 4, 2006

For the mac impaired: Creating user accounts in XP
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:24 AM on January 4, 2006

If using the same library, create playlists for each of you and have each iPod autosync only to its respective playlist.
posted by mcwetboy at 7:30 AM on January 4, 2006

For the general case, iTunes actually has a pretty good documentation under the Help menu.
posted by revgeorge at 7:33 AM on January 4, 2006

The easiest way to let her have her own iTunes library (and her own desktop, bookmarks and document folders) is to give her her own account and enable Fast User Switching.

My wife and I do this. I don't know if there is something wrong with my system, but half the time when I try to load songs onto my iPod, I get a message that says I can't because another user is running iTunes. So I switch over to my wife's desktop and find that iTunes is NOT running.

Sometimes I can fix the problem by pressing CTRL+ALT+DELETE and stopping any processes relating to iTunes and iPods (there are usually a couple running). Sometimes I can only fix it by doing a complete reboot.

It's really annoying!
posted by grumblebee at 7:45 AM on January 4, 2006

From Apple's support site: How to use multiple iPods with one computer
posted by bwilms at 7:47 AM on January 4, 2006

Just don't have your iPods automatically sync. See Bwilms' link for more.
posted by k8t at 8:30 AM on January 4, 2006

In windows you would have each user create their own profiles and keep their iTunes libraries separate...BUT, in XP you should DISABLE Fast User Switching (or make sure iTunes is shutdown in one profile before switching to another.
posted by Herman at 1:06 PM on January 5, 2006