Hey there I'm Donald Bell for CNET.com and today I'm going to show you how to sync
your iTunes libraries between multiple computers in your home, using a new feature in
iTunes 9 called home sharing. It’s a great solution for those times when you buy an
album or a kiddie show on your computer and your wife or kid wants to copy on their
computer too. It also comes in handy if you have a laptop and a home computer whose
music collections have branched apart and you like to get them back in sync.
The first step is to make sure all the computers in your home are running iTunes 9 or later
and are connected to the web through your home router. Next, find the first computer you
want to share from and select the home sharing icon in the left window of iTunes. If you
don’t see an icon, go into the advanced menu of iTunes and select turn home sharing on.
In the main window, you should see a place to plug in your iTunes store login and
password. After hitting, create home share, repeat these same steps on the other
computers in your home. iTunes only allows a maximum of five computers to be
authorized so if you're managing more than that, choose carefully.
After you're done, you should see each of the other libraries appear in the left window of
iTunes. From here, you can browse and play any of the files and best of all, you can
transfer a content out of one library and into another. To quickly see just the content you
don’t already have, use the menu on the lower left corner to filter out the duplicates. You
can also use the settings button in the lower right corner to automatically transfer any
new iTunes store purchases between libraries. Automatic syncing works only with
iTunes-purchased content and applies to purchases made after the setting was switched
on, so old purchases will still going to need to be transferred manually.
So that’s home sharing on iTunes 9, a feature that makes it much easier to distribute your
iTunes music and videos across all the computers in your home. For CNET.com, I'm
Donald Bell.
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