Q: On my Windows XP PC I have an admin account set up for me and an non-admin account set up for my son. The iTunes library on my administrative account is the one my son has been using and it contains his songs. I want to transfer his songs in my admin account to his non-admin account essentially deleting all the songs in my administrative account. Our music taste is not the same and I’d like to have songs on the admin account that are mine. Can anyone help me with this?
– Mike
A: This is actually fairly easy to do provided that you have allowed iTunes to organize all of your music tracks automatically for you. If all of the music is located in the “iTunes Music” or “iTunes Media” folder under the main “iTunes” folder found in “My Music” then you can simply move the entire “iTunes” folder from your “My Music” folder in your Administrative account over to your son’s “My Music” folder in his non-administrative account. Since your son’s account is not an administrator account, you will also need to ensure that you change ownership and permissions of the iTunes folders and the files contained therein so that he can access them.
If you have been importing music and leaving it in its original locations, this process may be a bit trickier depending on where the files are located and whether or not your son’s non-admin account will have access to them. You can simplify this by using the “Consolidate Files” option in iTunes, described in our article on Transferring your iTunes Library in order to copy all of the media files into your iTunes folders, or if you’re certain that the music files are stored in locations that your son’s non-admin account can access you can simply leave them in place, since you’re basically moving the database files on the same PC, so the paths to those files will remain exactly the same regardless of which account you’re actually logged in to.