iTunes 9: Home Sharing FTW!
Apple has added a powerful feature to iTunes 9: Home Sharing. It’s all about resolving the many problems inherent in using iTunes to purchase music, movies and iPhone apps, as well as ripping CDs. In any home, more than one person is likely to want to listen to the same music. When I rip a CD that I like, others in my household – my wife and son – may want the same music on their Macs to put on their iPods. Before, I’d have to send the music over the network, and they’d have to add it to their library. It was doable, but it was a hassle.
Enter Home Sharing. Just turn the feature on (Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing), enter your iTunes account info (you need an iTunes Store account to do this, even if you only want to share content that you’ve ripped from your own CDs, and all the computers need to use the same iTunes account), then click Create Home Share. After you’ve done this on all your Macs, you’ll see them show up in the Shared section of iTunes sidebar. You can, of course, listen to music from a shared library as before, but you can also select tracks in the library, then click the Import button at the bottom right of the iTunes window to have those items copied to your library. You can do this with movies and music files, as well as radio station links, but not with audibooks from Audible or QuickTime sound files.
But it gets even better when you decide to automate the process. Click the Settings button and you’ll see a dialog which lets you choose to automatically transfer new purchases for different types of media.
However, this only works with media or apps purchased from iTunes; this doesn’t effect CDs you rip yourself. To find the latest additions on each library, just use the built-in Recently Added smart playlist, and select the new tracks you want to copy.
The best thing about this is how easy it is to copy from one library to another. No more do you need to put files into drop boxes and manually add them to an iTunes library. iTunes handles everything. This is so simple that it’s foolproof, but it makes me wonder why Apple couldn’t have come up with it sooner.
Posted: 9/10/2009 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | 6 Comments »
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iTunes 9 transferred my old shopping art items to my new wish list. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to add new items to the wish list. There’s supposed to be a dropdown menu below “Buy Now” but it doesn’t display. Is this because I have a $20 store credit, and must I spend it before I can get that dropdown menu?
You want to click that arrow drop-down menu and choose Add to wish list. But if nothing displays in that menu, then you have a problem.
Does Itunes have to be up and running on the MAIN itunes before it can be shared to my second computer??
Yes, each computer that wants to share – in either direction – has to be running for this to work.
So, if I see an album I like on someone’s playlist, would I have to pay to copy it?
You can only see the contents of libraries – with home sharing at least – that are set up to share with you. In that case, however, you can copy anything they contain.