Having a Mac mini as a home theatre PC is great because it allows me to listen to my music collection on my living room sound system. Doing this requires an iTunes library though, so I’ve been looking for a way to synchronize the library on the mini with the library on my iMac.

This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I have my music collection on a share on my server, so I don’t have to duplicate my music on both Macs, but it’s really the library files that need to be synced. The reason for this is that iTunes doesn’t have a function to monitor a directory for changes in content. If I add an album to my library from my iMac, the music gets copied to the server, but the mini won’t know about it, so that album will never get played there.

There’s an app called Syncopation that will keep two iTunes libraries in sync, but it requires the application to be open on both macs, and it costs $25. That’s too much to pay for something I should be able to do for free.

What I decided to try (and I suggest you back up your library files if you try this) was to share the iTunes directory on my iMac with my mini. Then, I just made an alias on my mini from ~/Users/username/iTunes to the iTunes directory on my iMac.

I’ve been successful with this so far. I’ve had music playing on both macs at the same time, and updates to the library appear to work properly although I haven’t really put this method through it’s paces yet. I imagine I’m going to run into trouble if both macs try to update the library at the same time, but hopefully iTunes will handle this gracefully.

All of this won’t work between a Mac and a PC. There are differences between the library files for Mac and Windows. I think it has to do with file paths, although you might have some success between two PCs (would Windows shortcuts even work?).

I’ve done something similar with iPhoto as well. I just opened iPhoto while holding the option key and chose the library on my iMac. This will only work if iPhoto isn’t open on the other Mac though since iPhoto locks the directory when it’s open.

Anyway, if there’s a better way to do this, I definitely want to know about it. Maybe there’s even a free app out there to do the job. If you know of a solution, please send me an email, or better still, leave a comment for all to read.