Perhaps more than one person uses your Mac, each with his or her own user account. If so, the chances are there's a lot of music on the hard drive that you can't add to your iTunes library. While tracks stored outside your iTunes Media folder can be added to your music collection, if they're inside someone else's home folder, they can't be reached. But there's a solution. Move your iTunes music collection to a shared folder and other people with accounts on your Mac can play them natively in their own iTunes music library. Any number of people can share their music with other account holders on the same Mac in this way. After following this tutorial, your main iTunes music library will contain all of your own iTunes media and also that of other account holders, all seamlessly combined. Tracks or albums that are in several account holders' libraries will appear multiple times in the combined collection, but you can always delete the spares. Finally, if your iTunes library was created before iTunes 9, your iTunes Media folder is called iTunes Music.

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Tutorial: How to merge iTunes music collections