Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes – How to Share Libraries is a hoary how-to covering a way to provide full-user-rights access to a single song collection.

I’m reviewing this to see if there’s a way to rip simultaneously to a networked storage area from two or more machines and have the new song data be simultaneously available to all the copies of iTunes running. Currently, System A and System B write file data to the Library files separately and locally.

The obvious solution is to go under the hood and set up symbolic links such that all the iTunes instances write to the same file. The question is, “Can iTunes manage record-locking, or does it rely on a file-locking approach? What if there is no locking protocol at all? Does that corrupt the database?”

Generally, I suppose the right way to work this out is to test it empirically, since it’s easy to rebuild the database if there’s a problem by smply dragging the files into the iTunes window.

One supposes that disabling iTunes’ “keep my music folder organized” option might be a bright idea before moving ahead wth the test.