First, there's a difference between your iTunes music LIBRARY, and your iTunes music FOLDER.

** Your iTunes music Library is nothing more than a list of the songs that have been imported into itunes with links to where the files are saved at.
** Your iTunes music Folder is the designated folder where iTunes saves music to.

Your music LIBRARY should pretty much always live inside your local hd/Users/USERNAME/Music/iTunes location. Your music FOLDER can live anywhere that you tell it to in the iTunes preferences.

If you put your music FOLDER on a device that is accessible by multiple machines / users, they will all be able to play music from that location. Additionally, if they specify that location as THIER music FOLDER, iTunes will save music back to that location. BUT... when they add music it ONLY updates the FOLDER and NOT your iTunes Music Library. So if the eMac added music, it won't show up in your Library automajickally.

Further, iTunes will ONLY add files to your music FOLDER if you have selected the option in Advanced preferences to do so (or if you are ripping directly into itunes the songs you are ripping are saved there). In which case, it will make a COPY of the song into your iTunes music FOLDER when added to your Library ... UNLESS the file you have added is already inside your iTunes Music Folder, then it will MOVE the file to the correct organization place if it isn't already there.

(in short, if you re-add songs that are already inside your music Folder it doesn't make copies, just reorganizes them.)



Most likely what happened is that your Library files became corrupted at some point, which is irrelevant to the second machine utilizing the same music folder (since your library files are stored on your local machine's drive, and not the xHD). Make sure your music folder location is set correctly, then re-add all the songs into your iTunes and you should be good to go.

No - as long as you have itunes set to organize your music folder for you, and you don't change this location, itunes is smart enough to leave the files where they sit and just build a new library.

Just make sure, when you tell itunes to delete your library, to NOT delete the files.

I had an issue with itunes "losing" files in the library, only to find them right where they should be when I looked for them. There became so many of these "lost" files that I went through and killed the library and re-imported it.

An option you may consider for multiple machines connected to one library is to install have itunes setup for sharing. It's a pretty simple process in the preferences pane, and as long as your "server" machine is running itunes, any machine on the network can view the library/playlists as if sitting at that machine. **This feature also makes troubleshooting a network connectivity issue easier, as the program seems to broadcast for other itunes/limewire software.**

quite a job those guys did on that software.

-tom