Making iTunes Play Tunes From Shared Folder on Network

[waterman]

Greetings.

We have thousands of sound effects at the post house at which I work. I created a SoundFX sharepoint that autmounts in /Network/SoundFX when network users log in. I’d like for them to be able to be able to use iTunes to listen to and search through the files in that folder without copying them to their home directory. This is in the interest of saving drive space and not generating duplicates of all these files as our editors use them.

I changed some prefs in iTunes as follows:
* I set the music folder location to /Network/SoundFX
* I unchecked the “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” check boxes

Can anyone suggest other modifications needed to make iTunes work in this way? Thanks for your help.

[waterman]

Okay… I think I’ve got a solution in mind. Looking for some feedback…

Here’s the plan:

I’m going to set up a computer with a 200GB RAID array in our machine room specifically for soundfx and music, creating a centralized iTunes library. Then I’m going to set up a little script that executes on the client computers when they log in. It will check to see if they have an iTunes library in the appropriate place. Then one of two things will happen:

1. If they [b:9b0cda4154]don’t[/b:9b0cda4154] have the library I’m going to copy the iTunes library into the folder (probably about 2MB). Then, I’m going to set up a cron job to synchronize the libraries every few minutes using rsync.

2. If they [b:9b0cda4154]do[/b:9b0cda4154] have the library in there I’m going to use rsync to sychronize the libraries w/ cron every few minutes.

How’s that sound? Is there anything else that iTunes needs to work in the way I want it too? Thanks for your feedback.

[Author]

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