itunes, dad, LOTS of music

[gotspeed]

k brand new amd dual core (my first build :) ) on the main floor of the house. and a old dell 8100 in the basement. i had the great idea of talking not so tech savy dad in to putting all of his cds from the past 15 years (well over 8,000 songs) and maybe even some of the vinyl that fills 6 boxes that 6 prestone antifreeze jugs came in.(again wasnt smartest move on my part lol) for the most part all the music is riped and done the hard part now is keeping what is added up to date on the two computers he uses.

i have tryed using sync toy to keep a copy on a nas200(linksys network storage) and backing up and syncing from it but its a pain you cant have itunes open on the computer and its just over all crapy. is there any other way that you use to keep a copy of all your music backed up on a network drive and also be able to update it from both computers and have the changes jump to the other when you sync them

i would like to keep the nas as the center just so both computers dont have to be on at the same time. but it doesnt really matter just keeping the track info and adding the songs that were riped on one machine up to date with the other.

maybe a short segment on this for the show.

ps. its up to 4500 (256)(35+ gigs) mp3 all with the album art even the ones that where not downloaded were scanned in and added. we haven't started on the vinyl yet....

[neutrino15]

I think you are asking if one can sync iTunes libraries accross multiple PCs. Or at least keep one's iTunes library on a central server, and access it from multiple PCs.

If that is your question, the answer is no. iTunes does not have a multi-user feature, and therefore will not expect two computers to be looking at the same library at once. You can point both machines to the same library, but if you make a change on one machine, quit, then quit the other machine, the library will be overwritten with the older state.
Simply, you have to be careful to only use iTunes on one machine at a time.

If you want to try a third party application, A quick google search yielded this program. (http://lifehacker.com/software/itunes/hack-attack-automatically-sync-itunes-to-any-folders-175161.php) I have never used it, and therefore can not vouch for it. However, it seems to scan a given folder, and automatically update iTunes to mirror the contents of the folder.. So what you would do is install the batch file on all of your client machines, and set the directory to your nas library. Every time iTunes starts (or every day) you can have it update your library to match the nas.
Just an idea, never used that piece of software personally.

However, if you do end up switching from iTunes to something else, you do not need to re-rip anything. Most software supports itunes library imports, and remember, in your library the music files are organized in a very standard Artist/Album/Song.flac directory tree. As long as you didn't use apple lossless, you probably don't need to re-encode anything either.