My iPod woes

My wife and I just got our first iPod, a little 2GB Nano, 2nd Generation. We are a bit behind the times on this one, but I was finally able to convince her to get one when her old Walkman died.

Anyway, that's not the geeky bit. It seems pathetic to open with something I haven't figured out yet, but I wanted to write down what I've got so far in hopes that my first readers will be able to point me to a solution to my problem.

We have a laptop running XP (and Linux, although that's not relevant for this discussion) that we use to sync the iPod. We each have an account on the laptop, so my geek toys and things don't clutter her desktop also. She's less technically inclined than I am, so we have her account's iTunes instance as the master for the iPod.

Now, it turns out that it is seriously not trivial to share an iTunes library between two separate XP users. It is possible to share the files, which we already do, but I have had no luck tracking down a way to share the library files. Just to make it clear what I already did, we both have our library directories pointing to the same point in our file system. So we have one copy of each music file/podcast/etc. We only use one iTunes Music Store account. So all the music files are actually functional for both of us, and we don't need extra copies of any of them. This is all good. The problem is that the XML files containing the library (really the index, I guess) are duplicated. When one of us imports new music, or gets a new podcast, the other has to manually import it.

I've tried removing iTunes settings in \DaS\wife\[Local Settings]\Application Settings and replacing them with shortcuts to the same directories in my profile directory, but that didn't cut it. It just recreated the real directories and ignored the shortcuts.

It might be possible to that fsutil could work. I haven't yet tried this, but it seems like a hard link could conceivably do the trick where the shortcut didn't. The trouble? Well, it really seems like this is the sort of thing that Apple didn't design iTunes to do, which of course means that doing it is liable to cause problems. Each iPod is only supposed to synchronize with one XML file, I guess, but I'm worried that both of us using the same XML file is going to corrupt the thing somehow, and cause problems that will make it so neither of us can sync. I can't be the only person out there wanting to do this, am I? With luck I'll have another post reporting success or definitive failure soon.