How to share my iTunes library so that my pc and mac can use it and keep unicode filenames?

January 3, 2010 12:17 PM

I want to put my itunes library on a shared drive or NAS. I have 2 spare older laptops and was hoping to connect external drives to them and share them. But I have some (a lot of) songs that have filenames not in english. Some are unicode and some are big5 (an asian character encoding). I also want to be able to admin my itunes from windows and mac os or maybe just mac os.

What is the best way to do this? I was thinking of installing unbuntu on my laptop, connect an external drive to the laptop via usb or maybe through an external sata port and share it over the network as a smb share? Is that the best way or make sure the filenames are preserved?

If filenames weren't an issue, that would be the route I would take unless my method is flawed.

Thanks,

posted by brinks to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: With iTunes Sharing you could install iTunes on your network share, import your iTunes library, then simply install iTunes on all the computers on your network and have them connect to your shared iTunes through the network.

To keep your play counts and ratings metadata:
Make sure to to allow iTunes to keep your music organized. Then copy your current music directory into the new installation directory. Open iTunes Library.xml in a decent text editor and find and replace the old path/to/music/file with new/path/to/music. Then simply import that xml file in the new iTunes installation. Delete the duplicate playlists imported. Done.
posted by axismundi at 12:36 PM on January 3, 2010

Dittoing iTunes sharing - it's not perfect (you can't create playlists on the clients, for example) but it's very, very simple to use and solves or avoids sooo many headaches that you are likely to find if you try using a more OS-centric file sharing mechanism.
posted by kcds at 2:26 PM on January 3, 2010

Response by poster: does it matter what file system I use for itunes? and I guess I need to import the new XML into each pc that is running itunes right? so that I can keep all metadata, etc right?

thanks,
posted by brinks at 3:33 PM on January 3, 2010

File system does not matter. You will only need to import the iTunes Library.xml file on one iTunes installation (the one serving the media) - the other iTunes will connect to this one library.
posted by axismundi at 5:28 PM on January 3, 2010