Last night, I set up iTunes so that it uses one library for all my accounts on my mac, and figured to do a little writeup.
Let’s say you have an account, jam, and want it to use the iTunes library from the account bees. I assume you’ve already got bees’ iTunes stuff set up how you like.
There are two key insights:
a) both accounts are, by default, part of the staff group
b) your iTunes library is, at its heart, just a folder on the file system
In jam:
1. Open a console
2. cd ~/Music
3. remove the iTunes folder and ln -s ~bees/Music/iTunes .
That’s the initial, basic setup done. If you open iTunes, though, you’ll find that you can’t write to anything from the jam account, so you can’t actually do useful things, like opening iTunes.
However! From the jam account, open a Terminal and:
su - bees
Now, in the bees terminal:
cd ~/Music/iTunes
ls -l
Now, the owner of each file is bees:staff, right? And bees has the correct permission for writing everywhere, right? So, use chmod to replicate the user permissions to the group permissions for every folder, and for your library files and whatnot:
-rwxrwx---@ 1 bees staff 806136 1 Aug 2008 Temp File.tmp
-rw-rw-r--@ 1 bees staff 4628440 17 Oct 08:32 iTunes Library
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bees staff 1122304 17 Oct 08:31 iTunes Library Extras.itdb
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bees staff 83341312 13 Oct 15:50 iTunes Library Genius.itdb
drwxrwx--- 69 bees staff 2346 16 Oct 12:17 iTunes Music/
-rwxrwxr-x@ 1 bees staff 22701215 16 Oct 13:22 iTunes Music Library.xml
-rwxrwx---@ 1 bees staff 8 17 Oct 08:31 sentinel
Now, cd iTunes\ Music/ and do the same trick here, then cd into Music and Podcasts and those guys and do the same trick there.
Of course, it’s directories which need their permissions changing, not files, so if you want to you can always find ./ -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \; from the iTunes directory if you want to be quick about the majority of this. After that, go find the files which need their permissions changing too, like the iTunes library xml file, and you’re rockin’ and rollin’.
Jam and Bees 