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I'd be really grateful if anyone can help me with this, I spent literally days trawling the net before I came across this site, which seems to have very knowledgable people!

So, the problem is:

For years I've had a couple of PCs and a NAS drive. I've been storing all my music on the NAS drive and then accessing the library on whichever PC I wanted to by pointing both PCs to the NAS drive iTunes files. The good thing is I can see all my playlists and song ratings etc.

Now, I've just bought a Macbook Pro as well. And I want to be able to access the same music, song ratings etc on this machine. I've tried simply holding down option and navigating to the .itl files that my Windows machine created, but that doesn't work.

Is there some way to use the same iTunes Library (apart from home sharing) on both machines?

Thank you so much for reading this.

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  • Move the iTunes library onto NAS and making iTunes read the library on the NAS seems to be the best way. Did you face any problems while doing so ?
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Commented Dec 13, 2010 at 15:32

3 Answers 3

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The problem is that the underlying structure does not yield itself to being easily shared. Here's a similar issue with the problems explained: How to setup an iTunes library to use between two Macs?. Any chance one or more existing iTunes clients were open when you tried to add the MBP?

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  • Thanks so much for your reply. It certainly doesn't sound straightforward, and I think I may abandon the idea of trying to use one iTunes file for both Mac and PC. Would anyone happen to know whether it would be a problem to point my Mac at the same location on the NAS? All the music is stored on the NAS (there's a LOT) so I don't want to have to put the music on my Mac as it would kill the hard drive space. If the Mac and the PC are pointing to the same location, do you think the iTunes files will conflict in some way?
    – Franco
    Commented Dec 13, 2010 at 12:01
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There's a better way to share an iTunes library between machines. Simply turn on Home Sharing in iTunes, this works when the iTunes library is on a machine in your network, with this switched on, other iTunes clients on other machines can see the same iTunes library.

If you want to keep the library on a NAS, thats a separate issue, I think if you google for that you will find that the process is basically the same as putting the iTunes library on an external drive on the machine.

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If you're just wanting to be able to play streamed music via iTunes in your client machines, and you don't care so much about the iTunes metadata, you can check out this solution using Firefly's mt-daap service to serve your music instead of iTunes on the NAS.

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