How can I share files in the Music folder across two accounts on a Windows 10 PC

Question

So, my father just got a new Dell Latitude computer and has tasked me to move all his iTunes music (41GB worth) from his old computer to his new computer.

To facilitate this I copied the iTunes folder onto an external hard drive and then onto the new computer putting the iTunes folder in the Music folder on my fathers login.

My father and sister both use iTunes and the music listed and have separate logins. After I copied everything over and started iTunes on my father's login all the music appeared to be there.

Then iTunes had a large update and had to restart the computer. After restart my sister logged in and said "all the music is gone". Turns out there was about 10GB there, but not the full 41GB.

Now my father's new computer has a 120GB SSD and after the copy only had about 30GB left on the drive. I didn't consider this (nor did I realize the computer was logged into my sisters account) and I thought that the iTunes update/restart wiped the folder, so I copied the files back over.

This resulted in an error saying there was no room, and me realizing I was on my sisters account. I figured there was probably a sharing thing going on, so I deleted everything in the Music folder while logged into my sister's account.

Then I switched to my fathers login confirmed all the music was there, went to the Music folder and shared it with my sister's account, and made sure she had read/write access (it was already showing read access). I then switched back to my sister's login and still no music. My father's login account still has all the music.

So, how can I get both my father's login and my sister's login to show all the Music that is currently in my father's login Music folder?

Sorry for the long windedness, but I thought the details may be relevant to any solution provided

Answer 1

The issue is that iTunes creates a library file for each account, so the library is different for each user. You can put the music in the "public" folder that Windows creates, and make that a watch folder in iTunes under both accounts. Or you can create folder somewhere on the C drive, call it "Music," put all the music in it and configure iTunes to watch that folder. Yet another way is to create a common iTunes library for both users that points to the same file. You can do this in windows by using the "mklink" command line tool.