[iTunes] iTunes network problem

[John Pariseau]

> I'm setting up an iTunes server for a sound design class- putting  
> about 80 cd's worth of sound effects
> cd's available for the students to listen to and decide what they  
> need for the project their working on.
>
> I just tried it out today and hit a snag - I knew there was a limit  
> of 5 simultaneous connections
> (there are 8 in the class, I was going to set up 2 separate  
> identical hard drives on 2 separate networked
> computers). But the message that came up when I tried to connect on  
> a 6th computer that
> there is a limit of 5 networked users PER DAY. Is there any way  
> around this? This makes administration of
> this much tougher, and prone to many headaches that I don't need.
> Or is there another shareware app that would let users see and  
> listen to iTunes over the network
> without this roadblock. Even better - would allow them to download  
> the track to their computer to work with after they
> audition it.

Crazy thought here, might require a bit of scripting.

Set up one machine and use it as a networked server with a share -  
you could give them read permissions only. Then, for the student's  
machine (or are students bringing their laptops in?), have it load  
the share on startup and have the local version of iTunes read the  
files. You'd need to have a set of master iTunes prefs, and maybe  
have those load on startup (after the drive loads) so the iTunes  
playlists are always correct.

Then, to download the files, I believe they can just drag a file from  
iTunes onto the desktop.

This is much more complicated than iTunes sharing, and there might  
even be a cheap shareware application out there that does all this  
and more. I'm not aware of any, but versiontracker.com might have  
exactly what you are looking for.

John Pariseau