Transfer iTunes Music from One AppleID Account to A Different person's iTunes AppleID iTunes Library

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Level 1

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Transfer iTunes Music from One AppleID Account to A Different person's iTunes AppleID iTunes Library

Is it Possible to Transfer Music (Bought With My AppleID) from my iTunes Library to my Wife's iTunes Library? When we bought our 1st iMac years ago we set-up user accounts for each of us. Being unfamiliar with how the whole Apple system worked we just ended-up using my UserAccount for mostly everything - especially music.

So now although my wife has her User Account and AppleID all her music is mixed with mine in my iTunes library. We bought dozens of albums in iTunes for her under my appleid - when she wanted an album I just bought it from iTunes and it went to my library.

Now that we are a bit more sophisticated and for some other reasons we understand that all her music should be separated into herown iTunes library under her AppleID.

So is it possible to "transfer" her iTunes music from my library to her's?

Thanks in advance for your patience with what is probably a really dumb question.

iMac 21.5" 4K, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 19, 2019 6:07 PM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

Level 10

273,219 points

Jul 20, 2019 10:59 AM in response to samson16

New purchases should be OK, but redownloading past purchases or activating certain features can lock you to the account used for 90 days at a time. Details at More about associated devices. For DRM free content as long as you have a copy of the file you can use it as you please, so keep all of your content downloaded somewhere and keep it backed up. Access to the purchase history of an Apple ID relies on you knowing the Apple ID's email address and password combination so make sure that you share these with each other to retain access to each other's accounts.

tt2

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

273,219 points

Jul 20, 2019 8:43 AM in response to samson16

You cannot transfer content from one Apple ID to another. Music purchased from the iTunes store since 2009 should not be laden with DRM, so you can happily copy the files from one computer to another as use them as needed. I presume you have separate libraries on separate computers as managing downloads from multiple IDs on a single computer presents its own problems. See Authorization vs. association - Apple Community.

tt2

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Answer 3

samson16 Author

Level 1

24 points

Jul 20, 2019 10:51 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks for your help.

Unfortunately we do have two ids on the same computer although she has not bought anything under her id on the device in years - if she wanted some itunes album I just bought it on my itunes account and we listened to the music thru accessory speakers plugged in to the computer. This may seem a bit odd but we are not kids and don't need to carry all the music around with us - we just like it in the house and it didn't seem important how its was purchased.

What brought this up is estate planning. Although we are both reasonably healthy we do want to get our affairs in order if something happened to one of us. If my wife were to survive me thru some unexpected event I would want her to be able to access all her music bought under my appleid in my library - that's why I started thinking about a way to make her library/music separate from my appleid.

In addirion I really don't understand the whole associated/authorized devices business. I thought worst case we would just use her user account on the iMac, go to her iTunes account and repurchase (using her AppleID) perhaps not all of her many albums but maybe a few dozen of the most important. However the way I understand "associated devices" policy is that if we did this then I would not be able to buy anything from iTunes or iBooks for 90 days using my id since its the same "device". Then after I did so she would be locked-out for 90 days. and so on ad infinitum...unless I misunderstand how this association business works.

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