iTunes is something a whole lot of folks tolerate. It’s never been the best at any particular thing (except perhaps activating and syncing your iPhone or iPad, where it’s the only official game in town), but it certainly does a lot of stuff. Sometimes slow, sometimes crashy, and perpetually gaining features, it’s the app we use every day but rarely with any joy. One of its more frustrating aspects is its lack of an officially supported server component—Apple seems stubbornly unwilling to provide a real iTunes server, and so folks who would otherwise happily centrally locate a media library on a perfectly suitable NAS are stuck with islands of music. Building a central multi-user iTunes server that works consistently and well— that’s also easy to configure and maintain without needing remote administration tools or command line hackery—is annoyingly difficult.

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