Yes, I Love Technology

Yes I love technology
But not as much as you, you see
But I still love technology
Always and forever

Man, technology rocks, but it is damn addictive. Follow this slippery slope... Ted buys a laptop computer. Ted buys a router to set up a wireless network at home to link new laptop with old desktop. Desktop is very slow but functional. Things are running smoothly.

Christmas arrives. Ali buys Ted an iPod. Ted buys Ali a TiVo. Ted spends hours ripping his entire music collection and organizing it - every CD ever purchased plus every song ever downloaded, don't forget every CD Ali ever purchased. Album art attached to all songs. iPod running smoothly. Then we move back home. Ted spends hours again setting up TiVo to wireless network. Everything running smoothly.

Now Ted endeavers to stream his newly archived music collection to TiVo so his home stereo can play music and display album art. This means a central storage location is needed. Ted buys a network hard drive. Portable, gigantic and easy to install. Very smooth. Able to access it through TiVo using 3rd party software installed on the old desktop. Additional bonus - our entire photo archive can stream to TiVo from the network drive, as well as movie times, weather, traffic and other cool apps that can all be viewed through TiVo. But, things not so smooth!

The old desktop is painfully slow and barely can run iTunes to host the streaming. Also, Ali cannot work on presentations, reports or internet on the slow beast. Enter Super Bowl pool victory (see below). Now Ted buys new Dell desktop as an internet hub/MS Office machine. Things running smoothly again.

Latest snag requiring late night internet research, how to run iTunes from 2 different computers when using a shared music library. What's the problem, you might ask. Well, every time a new song is added using one computer, the other one doesn't recognize it. Every time you modify ID3 tags for a song on one computer, the other doesn't recognize it. This makes a shared music library obsolete! Difficult to add the same files and make the same changes twice (once for each computer).

So here is my latest solution...
1) Copy your iTunes library files (iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml) to a safe location as a backup. This will save all count, rating and playlist info.

2) Uninstall iTunes on both computers. I used Control Panel to complete this. Then I manually deleted the iTunes folder in the My Music folder under My Documents on both computers.

3) Reinstall iTunes on both computers as normal.

4) Change the iTunes Music Folder Location to the Network Hard Drive location on each computer.

5) Download and install TweakUI from Windows website.

6) Run TweakUI for each computer according to the instructions at the link below. I placed the My Music folder into a new My Music folder on the Network Hard Drive. I pointed both my laptop and desktop to the same location. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302398

7) Paste the iTunes library files from step 1 into the new iTunes folder on the Network Hard Drive. This will automatically transfer your previous Library into the new iTunes. All playlists will be perfect!

Everything now works absolutely perfectly - until the next thing I want to fix. I love technology!