How we share our iTunes content
Our house has become completely Mac-based in the last 9 months. We have a Macbook Pro 17, three Macbooks, a Mac Mini, and two AppleTV units. The Mac mini has a Western Digital My Book drive attached via firewire that holds our iTunes library and (for now at least) other files that we need to keep on the network and serves as the master iTunes library for the house. One thing that we (and several hundred other people that I’ve seen posting on the subject) have had to try to figure out is how to deal with a consolidated iTunes library being shared among all the machines.
My first thought was to just symlink the iTunes folder in the Music folder to the network location. However, on trying that, any of the laptops would get some message about the library already being open (because the Mac Mini always has it open as it shares to the rest of the house).
So, I set out on a mission to figure out how to automate the process of updating the iTunes library files on the laptops with the master library from the Mini.
