How to Centralize Your Music Across Multiple Computers/Users with iTunes

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ITunes is a great way to keep your music organized. But what happens when you have music on multiple computers with different users? This program has the ability to centralize all your music to one place. but it does take a bit of cooperation on your part to keep it organized.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Step1

Start up all your computers. Open iTunes on each one. Make sure you have enough time to go through all your music on every computer under every user.

Step2

Go through the names of the music. Add artist and album information to as many as you can. You can add the same info to multiple items by highlighting all the entries and hitting Control (or Command on mac) -I. Sometimes you will find the same artist with different spellings of their names. Simply click on the name of the artist, hit Control-I and change the name.

Step3

The bar at the bottom tells you that you are viewing duplicates only. Next, go to View>Show Duplicates. This will pop up list duplicate music on that computer under that user. Delete all the duplicate entries, making sure to move them to the trash. Repeat this on all computers, under all users.

Step4

Decide where you want to keep all your music.

Step5

Go to Preferences>Advanced. The General tab should be highlighted. Click Change next to iTunes Music Folder Location and select the folder you have chosen to store all your music. Do this for all users on all computers.

Step6

After you merge all your music, you will need to go back and delete all the old iTunes folders. Make sure you backup all your music before doing this.

Tips & Warnings

You will probably need to clean out your music again after you merge all your information to avoid duplicates between users and computers.
Check for duplicates from time to time. Don't allow all that work you did to go to waste!