January 5, 2010

Sharing iTunes Libraries at Home

Finally it's easy to share iTunes libraries among family members -- as easy in fact as going to the Advanced menu in iTunes 9 and choosing Turn on Home Sharing. Just do that on each one of the up to five computers you can enable on your home Wi-Fi or Ethernet network, and use the same iTunes account name for all of them. Once you've done that, all the libraries will show up in the Share area in the iTunes left-hand column for all the connected computers with Home Sharing turned on. You can take advantage of the network to stream tracks from any of the libraries if you just want to listen, and you can drag over anything you'd like to have in your own library for the next time you sync your iPod or iPhone. (By the way, if you'd like to automatically copy new purchases whenever they're made for particular libraries, select the library and use the Settings... button at the lower right of the iTunes window to check what you'd like copied.)