Protect Your Shared iTunes Library And Playlists With A Password [OS X Tips]

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iTunes Sharing Password

When I worked in an office, I shared several playlists from my Mac’s iTunes Library, including a Holiday music playlist and a couple of artist-specific playlists. I didn’t want everyone to be able to log in and share my tunes, however, as a few of the playlists contained songs with Explicit lyrics. I would have loved to have been able to protect these playlists from certain co-workers while allowing others to listen to the tunes I had set up.

Here’s how to do just that.

Launch iTunes, and then open Preferences from the iTunes menu, or hit Command-Comma on your keyboard. Click on the Sharing tab at the top, and (as long as Sharing is enabled, of course) click on either the “Share entire library” radio button, or the “Share selected playlists” button. If you choose the latter, click on the checkboxes next to the playlists you’d like to share.

Once that’s taken care of, click on the “Require password” checkbox, and type in a password that you’ll remember, and you’ll be able to share with the folks you’d like to give access to. Don’t use your Mac’s admin password or any other secure password that you don’t want to share. When finished, click on OK.

That’s it, then. Anyone who is on the same network as you will be able to share the library or playlists you’ve enabled, but only if they have the password you set up. You might also use this strategy if you want to share the library from one of your Macs to another one while on the same network, but don’t want to allow anyone else access. Just don’t give anyone your password.

Via: OS X Daily

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