Sharing iTunes but with different ratings for songs

On 2/28/05 1:55 PM, "charlie_franklin" <charlie_franklinmac.com> wrote:

> My wife and I have vastly different tastes in music, in fact it's a fair bet
> that if I have rated something as 5 stars in iTunes, she will give it 1 star,
> and vice versa.
>
> Despite this there is quite a lot of music that we both like. We both used to
> like the same sort of music, but I kept moving on with new music, where as my
> wife has tended to stay with stuff up to about 10 years ago.
>
> Currently we each have an entire copy of our music libraries on each of our
> laptops, but with a fair bit of new music that we have each purchased, both on
> line and physically, that is only on one machine. However it seems to me, to
> be more sensible if we could put all of it on a central iMac, and then use
> sharing to just play stuff we each want to hear.
>
> The problem comes, that I have rated all of the songs according to what I
> like, but that will not let her have smart playlists based on here different
> ratings.
>
> Does anybody know of a way to do this, so that although the music is sitting
> on a central server, we can each apply our own ratings to the music?

What you could do is create a second account for your wife. Open iTunes in
each account, and apply ratings there. You'd want to have both those
accounts running and sharing music across the network; you could name one
His Music and the other Her Music. Each account could create playlists and
unique ratings.
 

Kirk
 
                      Author of: iPod & iTunes Garage
                     http://www.mcelhearn.com/ipod.html
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      Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France

Charlie Franklin wrote:
>Does anybody know of a way to do this, so that although the music is
>sitting on a central server, we can each apply our own ratings to
>the music?

There's a tip for this on smartplaylists.com.

<http://smartplaylists.com/comments.php/id=p107-0-1-0-c>

In essence, use the comments field under 'File'->'Get Info' to assign
custom information, e.g. 'George ****|Dragon *' that you can then use
to sort appropriately when setting up subsequent playlists.

Alternatively, each of you adds tracks to your own master '*****
playlist' '**** playlist', etc, and then sorts appropriately when
setting up subsequent playlists. In some ways this is better than
changing the comments field, as it doesn't modify the song file
itself, thus reducing the load for incremental back-ups (if that
bothers you).

Hope that helps!

Chris Reed, BBR Solutions Ltd * http://www.bbr-online.com

charlie_franklin kindly wrote:
>Does anybody know of a way to do this, so that although the music is
>sitting on a central server, we can each apply our own ratings to the
>music?

There are several ways of accomplishing this. This is one of them:

1) set your iTunes preferences to manage your files manually (in the
Advanced Tab, uncheck 'Keep iTunes Music Folder organized' and ' Copy files
to iTunes Music Folder')
2) Empty your iTunes songlist of all music.
3) Drag your music into iTunes
4) Select all songs in the Library and type Cmd-I
5) In the following Dialog go to the 'Info'-tab and add a comment to all
files. For instance 'Charlie'.
6) Add the other persons music to iTunes Library.
7) Create two smart playlist: 'comment contains "charlie"' for you and
'comment does not contains "charlie"' for your wife.
8) You and your wife select their own playlist
9) Sit back and relax.


--
mare <marepeghole.com>

--On February 28, 2005 4:55:51 AM -0800 charlie_franklin
<charlie_franklinmac.com> wrote:

> Does anybody know of a way to do this, so that although the music is
> sitting on a central server, we can each apply our own ratings to the
> music?

I believe things like ratings are stored in the iTunes database, not the
id3 tags of the files themselves. If you each have your own database I
think this is doable.

Completely theoretical (i.e. i've not tried this myself and i would have a
darn good backup before trying this):

* On both computers: In iTunes Preferences (Advanced tab) turn off Keep
iTunes folder organized.
* Turn off Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library (same
advanced preferences).
* Change your iTunes Music Folder location to a network mounted drive
* Do a Consolidate Library on each computer to move their local libraries
to the server
* Do an Add to Library... selecting the network mounted drive. This should
add music from the other computer that doesn't exist in the current
database.
* On each computer play an iMTS song purchased on the other computer.
You'll be prompted to authorize each computer. This will cross authorize
the computers to play songs purchased on either machine (note that since
iTunes limits you to 3 computer authorizations this leaves 1 computer that
can be authorized for each user's songs.)

To add music, place it by hand in the folder on the server you want it in
and then go to the other computer and do an Add to Library.... Select the
network folder.

I have no idea what will happen when one user modifies id3 tags (this is
the stuff in the Info tab of a songs Get Info window). Also not sure how
Artwork is handled. Might be a good idea to get these straightened out on
one computer, before doing an Add To Library on the other computer.

It may be necessary to create/find an applescript to help manage the file
paths or find songs not in the library and add them (if the steps above
don't work). These scripts may help:

<http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/scripts07.php?page=1#addtolib>
<http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/scripts07.php?page=3#filemanager>
<http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/scripts07.php?page=4#movefilesfold>

I keep my iTunes library on a Linux server drive mounted via AFP using
Netatalk. I've also kept it on an NFS mounted drive.

<http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/>

The library files still reside in ~/Music/iTunes.

So basically what you want to keep from one computer's iTunes from
rearranging the location of the files, plus a way to modify the paths to
the files in the library (i did this on my computer by changing the default
location of my music, then doing a consolidate library. That might work for
you too.)

The only real downside to network mounted library is speed in adding files
to the library or updating an ipod (updating my ipod can be an hour long
process if I add a lot of songs.)

Kevin

Yeah, I'd say that the way to go is to have extra playlists as suggested by Chris:

Charlie *****

Charlie ****

Charlie *** (I'm not sure you'd bother with a playlist for anything less)

Missus *****

Missus ****

Missus ***

Rather than rating a song you'd drag the song file into the playlist corresponding to what you think of it. Then you can have the smart playlists refer not to the rating but to the playlists you set up.

Mendosi