Tutorial: How to use your Windows iTunes library in Mac OS X

[Benny33]

How to use your Windows iTunes library in Mac OS X

This is my first tutorial for these forums .
I thought I should help the community that has helped me.

In this tutorial I’ll detail the steps required to use the same iTunes library that is stored on your windows drive in OS X .
By doing so this will allow you to manage iTunes , sync with your devices and listen to your music library all within Mac OS X.

Problem:

Some of you may think this is easy to achieve and that it would be as simple as changing your preferences to load the windows library.

Well no , this is not the case , I thought the same thing when I went ahead and tried it. Our problem is that iTunes needs to be able to modify the library in order to use it .iTunes is unable to modify it due to mac os x not being able to write to our windows drive because it doesn’t support writing to NTFS (not to be confused with reading support).

We need to get write support for NTFS inside OS X.

Solution:

The only way to get this is to install some third party software on our machine , while there are commercial solutions I’m going to show you the free one . Everyone likes free stuff right?

We are going to need to install 3 things if you are running Lion (2 if snow leopard).
?
1, Download Mac Fuse , allows native file handling capabilities via 3rd party file systems.

2, Download NTFS-3G, The NTFS Driver for Mac OS X

3, Download the Mac Fuse patch to add support for Lion (Not needed for Snow Leopard).

4, Unpack Mac Fuse and install.

5, Unpack NTFS-3G and install.

6, When prompted at caching mode you have 2 options and this is personal preference.
No caching - is the safest however slowest.If your system locks up or kernel panics occur often while running select this , I would also recommend that you select this if using a portable hdd.

UBLIO caching - minor risk , however faster.All others select this.

6,Do not restart if you are running Lion , you’ll need to install the mac fuse patch otherwise errors will occur .Again unpack the fuse_wait.pkg and install.

NOTE:THIS STEP IS NOT REQUIRED IF RUNNING SNOW LEOPARD

7,Once installation is complete , restart your system.
We now have NTFS write support thanks to Mac Fuse and NTFS-3g all thats left is to tell iTunes to use our Windows Library.

8, Quit iTunes if already open , now hold down the option key (ALT) and open iTunes.

9, iTunes will now prompt you to choose a library .Click the Choose Library button.

10, Navigate to your iTunes library in your Windows Drive it is usually under

[Drive]\Users\[User name]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl

for example mine was:
Untitled\Users\Benny\Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl

Now you have iTunes filled with all your media exactly the same in windows.Now you can make changes , Sync devices on both platforms or even just listen to some tunes.

If you have any problems , criticisms or anything else please feel free to leave them.
Thanks

 

[eelhead]

Nice work and thanks!!

I will place this in the Music section though from Customization.
Also Sticky'ed for a bit as well

 

[pwalth21]

Interesting idea. If you import a new song on one os does it automatically show up on the other?

 

[Benny33]

Interesting idea. If you import a new song on one os does it automatically show up on the other?

Yes , any changes you make will automatically show up in the other OS.

 

[pwalth21]

Cool. I may have to change my set up, right now like many people I'm sure just have the files able to be viewed on both sides. Nice tutorial. I'm not on my Hack right now, but I was just thinking. Is it possible to put the library file in a different place than where the music is actually stored?

 

[karacho]

@pwalth21: You mean on a 3rd drive? sorry, i misunderstood

 

[pwalth21]

It's all good I see where the misunderstanding came in. I came home and answered my own question. Although you can move your library file to a different drive my idea is not the most feasible option. I was thinking that if you could put just the library file on a FAT32 partition of 1 GB that it would be able to be accessed from both Win and Mac and thus it would always be up to date. The problem with that is that if you were adding from both sides you would have your music/movies/apps in 2 different places. So much for my idea.

 

[DudeNamedDave]

Wow that is great!
Since I'm using Windows (or will use) as my main OS, that might come very handy

THANKS!

 

[stoj19]

This is exactly what I was looking for. Great tutorial, much appreciated.

 

[joesayegh]

Great tutorial!

Question: In order for this to work, is it essential that the itunes library and all the media is in the default location on Windows?

i.e. it must all be in !C:\Users\[INSERT NAME HERE]\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music

I've moved all my music and video to a seperate hard drive.
So my Windows iTunes library points to a path containing all the media called

"E:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Music"

Would your tutorial still work in this case?

Best regards,
Joe