How to keep music on a shared account separate?

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How to keep music on a shared account separate?

We have been able to do this for the past few years with no problem. We all downloaded music on a desktop computer and synced our ipods from it. Each family member has a different user account on the computer (not itunes, but the computer).

Recently, I got a new laptop and downloaded iTunes on it. However upon signing in it ended up sharing everyone's music with everyone else, presumably because there were no user accounts to separate music. I realized this later.

Now I need to get all of our music separated again and I cannot figure out how. Help?!

Posted on May 8, 2013 6:14 PM

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Answer 1

sterling r

Community Specialist

May 11, 2013 6:48 AM in response to sjkm

Howdy sjkm,

I was thinking about what could be causing this issue. You are all using the same AppleID with iTunes, it sounds like. So I feel that automatic downloads are the culprit in this case. This article named iTunes Store: How to enable Automatic Downloads found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4539 shows how to enable or disable the function by checking or unchecking the boxes.

Open iTunes.

If you have not already, authorize your computer for use with your Apple ID by choosing Store > Authorize This Computer. See this article for information about iTunes Store authorization.

For Mac computers: Choose iTunes > Preferences and click the Store tab.
For Windows computers: Choose Edit > Preferences and click the Store tab.

You can enable Automatic Downloads² for Music, Apps, or Books under "Automatic Downloads."

Also I was thinking that rather than each person going and deleting the songs they dont want from their respective user account, you could copy the itunes library from the individual user accounts on the computer they are organized correctly on, to the user accounts on the new computer. This article named iTunes: How to move your music to a new computer walks through how to do that, and offers different methods of copying the library over. It can be located here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527.

Take care,

Sterling

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Answer 2

sjkm Author

Level 1

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May 25, 2013 11:54 AM in response to sterling r

Thanks for your input Sterling, but I don't think you quite understand the situation.

The new computer is my personal computer that only I will be using. The desktop computer that everyone uses does not have the music organized correctly. That's the problem. No where is our music separate anymore. Everyone's music is in one big jumble in ALL of our destop user accounts.

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