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My wife and I both have iOS devices (some iPods, an iPhone, soon an iPad), which means that both our iTunes libraries have not only music, but also apps, podcasts, iTunes U stuff, etc.

How could we manage to share just the music in one single location, and still keep our apps/podcasts/etc separated from each other?

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Would iTunes Home Sharing work for you?

Basically, one of you would have all your music, but every device would have access to it.

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up vote 0 down vote

When the iTunes Store music was DRM'ed, this was a problem. But these days, your problem boils down to sharing the raw files for the music, and adding the directory containing those files to iTunes. Probably you're interested in the functionality of iTunes so that it can automatically "discover" music that has been added to a directory. I think that exists, but I haven't used it do far, so I don't know the details.

If some of your music is older and has access restrictions on it, then you have a bigger issue to work around. You can try to remove the protection. But otherwise, I don't a way to share protected music files and sync them together.

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This is a good question. It has several aspects to it, but those aspects are not obvious to people who might have this question. It makes sense to address several angles on this question in one answer. I wouldn't recommend splitting it up, or simply pointing to multiple other answers without summarizing an answer to the different aspects (file-sharing, DRM, sync-database-updating) – Chris Quenelle Jan 15 '11 at 23:35
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can you summarize the above and make it a comment? It doesn't offer a solution, so it shouldn't be down as an answer. – Dori Jan 16 '11 at 0:23
@Dori - Did you mean summarize my "answer" starting with "When", or summarize my comment to myself starting with "This is"? I would have made the second item be a comment on the original question, but I don't have the reputation to do that. – Chris Quenelle Jan 19 '11 at 17:27
I think your answer should be a comment, as it doesn't offer a solution to the question. If it was shorter I could just turn it into a comment as-is, but comments have a maximum length of 600 characters. – Dori Jan 20 '11 at 0:12

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