iTunes, sharing, NAS and that kind of thing

[TerryG]

I am hoping to find a little guidance here regarding iTunes sharing among multiple users and computers. I have a Mac mini that I run headless for audio playback and controlled via the iPhone app. My iTunes library is stored on a NAS (D-Link 321) in another room and also accessed from my office PC running Vista. The PC us used to sync our phones (podcasts and a bit of music) and for managing the music library.

 

The problem is that I don’t seem to be able to open the same library on both the mac and PC at the same time. I understand that I cannot have both machines editing the library simultaneously, but seems like I should be able to have it open on two machines. I am receiving an error saying that I don’t have permission to access the library (or something like that) when it is in use on the other computer. If necessary, I can accept giving the mini read only access and just rip CDs from the PC, but I really don’t want to have to close iTunes on the mini (since it is headless it is a bit of a hassle) every time we sync our phones. Any thoughts? Should it be possible for me to do this and I just need to do some more troubleshooting or is this just the way iTunes works?

 

Would it be better to access the library through the NAS’s built-in iTunes server function? Could I tell iTunes to load this up by default so I could control via the iPhone?

 

 

Terry