Feed up of copying files from your sister’s Mac and wanna keep upgrading with her iTunes library? Admiring your family member’s iTunes library and wanna keep it as yours? Thanks iTunes with its home sharing feature then! This function lets up to five computers in a single household share iTunes libraries easily. Here we would lead you to do the home sharing task step by step:
- Make sure your home Wi-Fi or Ethernet network on.
- Enable Home Sharing on your Mac as well as other Mac or PC on your network. For this part, you’d better use the same iTunes account name at all of computers in your house, which means that you can’t share music, movies, audio books and so on between your iTunes account and your significant other’s, for example, unless you also share an iTunes account.
- Once you’ve done that, all the libraries will show up in the Share area in the iTunes left-hand column for all the connected computers with Home Sharing turned on. Now you can freely access the other family member’s iTunes library and so do they.
After that, you can freely enjoy other music, movies, audio-books etc. on your family member’s iTunes. But there are still some failing grades:
- The most serious one is that, the automatic-transfer feature works only with the contents purchased from iTunes store. Those music you ripped from CDs or purchased online from other sources like Amazon, eMusic etc. would appears in Home sharing but won’t be automatically copied.
- You can’t use other’s iTunes library even it’s shared when that computer is offline.
- If you or your family member don’t like some songs or movies etc. in others’ iTunes libraries, you can’t exlude them even if you have to delete it manually.
- The comparison of iTunes libraries relies on the metadata included for each track. So if you’re pickier about artist, album or track names than other people in your house, iTunes may end up duplicating songs in your library.
Now, enjoy your family’s iTunes libraries together and have a fun time!
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