Maintaining Two Identical Itunes Libraries

Shane732

I've a few questions that perhaps you guys might be able to help me with....

I have all my media (music and movies etc...) stored on an external NAS drive. There's a number of things I'd like to do with this, as follows:

1) I want to maintain an identical library to the one on my NAS on another laptop. This is primarily to provide me with a back-up and good redundancy. So for example when I add a song/movie to my Itunes library it'll automatically update onto my laptop. Is this possible?

2) I have a number of laptop (3) all pointed at the NAS as the directory for itunes. Unfortunately when I add a song/movie to my library on one computer it doesn't automatically update on the other laptops - instead I have to search for the song on the other laptop despite it being in the itunes directory. Is it possible for itunes to pick up that a song/movie has been added to it's directory as opposed to having to search for it on each laptop?

Thanks in advance for your help...

coylemj

Shane732 wrote: »

2) I have a number of laptop (3) all pointed at the NAS as the directory for itunes. Unfortunately when I add a song/movie to my library on one computer it doesn't automatically update on the other laptops - instead I have to search for the song on the other laptop despite it being in the itunes directory. Is it possible for itunes to pick up that a song/movie has been added to it's directory as opposed to having to search for it on each laptop?

iTunes won't do this as otherwise it would need to do a full scan of your music library every time it started and this would slow things down considerably. I have a slight variation on your setup except I have two iTunes libraries on the same laptop (for an iTouch and a Nano) and both libraries point to a folder where I have stored most of my music. I have unticked the box which says to move the music to the iTunes folder when I add it to the library so the vast majority of my music is outside the iTunes folder.

When I add music to the common folder I have to point both iTunes libraries to the new folder, neither of them picks up the new folder automatically so in your case when you add music to the NAS you will need to manually point each instance of iTunes to the new folder to pick it up and add it to the library.

Kensington

iTunes builds an XML index of everything you add to your library. It stores this in the Music folder of your personal directory on the computer
eg. C:\Users\[your username]\Music on Windows 7

At the moment each laptop has its own index file. As you add stuff to iTunes on one laptop, it updates the index file for that laptop and the items get added to your library. Obviously, the other laptop index files don't update so the items don't appear in their libraries until you manually scan and their index files are then updated.

Way around it is windows lets you change the location of the Music folder, so you can move the Music directory location from each laptop onto a shared folder on the NAS. This means they will now share the same index files so what you do on one laptop will be reflected on all laptops which point to that share.

There is a drawback to this (which may not affect you) in that you can only open iTunes on one laptop at any given time, as the first laptop to open the shared index file locks the file until iTunes is closed.

Shout if you need any more info

darg

There's a free program called mediarover that keeps numerous itunes libraries in sync using a Nas