iPod: Two of most everything, 'cept playlists and ratings
The good news, Apple's aforementioned article does seem to work as advertised. I tested for awhile, various combination of things, and the tip does what the title suggests: allows two people to share a single library. That is the goal here so we may be OK.
The bad news, it's a one-shot thing... or rather, a manual process. There is (apparently) no way to configure iTunes to connect in an ongoing, seemless way to multiple libraries. Instead one must carefully, manually and periodically import from the shared library to her own library. I think it can work but seems a bit perilous... especially in the environment that I'm testing this for.
...and actually, the biggest concern here isn't Apple's software, but the fact that two users are going to be building separate, somewhat-shared libraries on the same machine (cool) which is a laptop (cool) with a limited amount of disk space (bad). I personally have enjoyed a giant iPod for a long time and been somewhat OK with knowing that my limited (also laptop) hard drive space has been the gating factor to filling up the thing and living the digital dream writ large. I can't imagine it will be any different for iPod users A and B; A likely is already wishing he had more disk, and as much as he'll want to try to make B happy and accomodate her needs, the fact remains that his laptop won't have a lot of extra space for B's music.
Enough blabbing here about this, for now. I need to get on the phone with these people, and will do so soon.
Monday, Oct 30 at 4:59 AM
