ITunes with 2 users - help please!

X and Y both have Ipods, and only have one PC. X hates Y's death metal, and Y hates X's boy band nonsense. If both Ipods are synced to the same machine, ITunes puts all of X's stuff and all of Y's stuff onto both players, and so on.

Bascially, they want to have 2 seperate libraries, one for each player, on the same machine.

Now, is it possible to sign users in and out in Itunes and it update the Ipods accordingly? I know that you can sign in and out of the shop, but I think that it still uses the same library irrespective of who is signed in.

Is it possible to partition the drive and have X's stuff, with a full Itunes install, on drive C, and Y's stuff, with it's own Itunes install, on drive D?

The users in question want to stick with Itunes, for reasons that escape me, so more helpful software is out of the question.

Google has not been my friend on this! The Itunes support seems to suggest that each time they update, they MANUALLY select which songs they want to be on their respective Ipods; that could get very time consuming!

Any help would be gratefully received.

If you're using Windows XP, I *think* separate login profiles would fix this.

Make playlists of the stuff they like and tell the ipod to sync only the playlists? That how it works for my phone anyways.

Unless I'm mistaken, I think you can put them into separate playlists, then set each ipod to sync using their respective playlists. I think those settings are stored in the ipod itself. Any music that is no longer wanted on the ipod(s) only need be (un)checked and/or removed from the playlist.

[edit] damn you Edwin... beat me to it.

Thanks guys, I'll pass that on.

Given the number of these things Apple are shifting, you'd really think that they would come up with a better method; it must be fairly common for households to have more than one.

spider_j wrote:

you'd really think that they would come up with a better method; it must be fairly common for households to have more than one.

No, they're using the right method. Separate people should be separate users on a computer system, no ifs ands or buts. It's kind of like having everyone try to get into the car using just the driver's door, then complaining that the car is too hard to get into. OSs have the users mechanism for differentiating between people.

Damn, smacked down from the honeymoon, even.

Hemidal wrote:

Damn, smacked down from the honeymoon, even.

He's just that cool.

Legion, I was going to post a quick set of instructions on how to do that, and then I realized it's not simple at all. It's messy and complex. You get into NTFS permissions, which are hairy.

Yes, the facilities exist in NT to do what he wants to do. But no normal human being could be expected to understand them without several hours of study or expert help.

He has a simple problem; he wants to drive to the grocery store with someone in the passenger seat of his car. You're telling him he's stupid for not knowing how to build and install a passenger seat himself.

Malor wrote:

Legion, I was going to post a quick set of instructions on how to do that, and then I realized it's not simple at all. It's messy and complex. You get into NTFS permissions, which are hairy.

Yes, the facilities exist in NT to do what he wants to do. But no normal human being could be expected to understand them without several hours of study or expert help.

He has a simple problem; he wants to drive to the grocery store with someone in the passenger seat of his car. You're telling him he's stupid for not knowing how to build and install a passenger seat himself.

Uhm, no.

Once more with feeling:

Step 1: Create new Windows user (something they should already have done for each person that uses the computer)
Step 2: Log in as new user
Step 3: Open iTunes
Step 4: There is no Step 4, problem already solved. iTunes just created a new library for user #2 without interfering with user #1's library at all.

There's no messing with NTFS permissions. There's no partitioning like the original poster thought they might have to do. It's just Multi-User Computing 101. Separate users = separate profiles = applications store data separately for each user.

The car door analogy stands.

*Legion* wrote:
Malor wrote:

Legion, I was going to post a quick set of instructions on how to do that, and then I realized it's not simple at all. It's messy and complex. You get into NTFS permissions, which are hairy.

Yes, the facilities exist in NT to do what he wants to do. But no normal human being could be expected to understand them without several hours of study or expert help.

He has a simple problem; he wants to drive to the grocery store with someone in the passenger seat of his car. You're telling him he's stupid for not knowing how to build and install a passenger seat himself.

Uhm, no.

Once more with feeling:

Step 1: Create new Windows user (something they should already have done for each person that uses the computer)
Step 2: Log in as new user
Step 3: Open iTunes
Step 4: There is no Step 4, problem already solved. iTunes just created a new library for user #2 without interfering with user #1's library at all.

There's no messing with NTFS permissions. There's no partitioning like the original poster thought they might have to do. It's just Multi-User Computing 101. Separate users = separate profiles = applications store data separately for each user.

The car door analogy stands.

Maybe I didn't have any feeling...see #2. *thought* it should work because I do not use iTunes and I do not own an iPod.

Sesos wrote:

Maybe I didn't have any feeling...see #2. *thought* it should work because I do not use iTunes and I do not own an iPod.

Yeah more feeling would have helped.

Any half-decent application made for a multi-user OS should work exactly this way. You correctly suspected how it would work without having touched iTunes or an iPod.