Two iTunes installs pointing at the same NAS share For many years, I have had a set of mp3 files on a NAS that I manually managed (I've been picky about artist/album/track naming). The two Macbooks in our house each have their own iTunes libraries (the itl and xml files) on their respective local drives at ~/Music/iTunes/. To add music, I just make sure the SMB or AFP share is mounted and then do "Add to Library" in iTunes, pointing it at the top of the music file tree on the mounted directory from the NAS. This has worked fine for years.

Now, I'm thinking I would like the entire iTunes folder (everything from ~/Music/iTunes and below) to live on the NAS and just let iTunes keep the music organized in a folder below this directory. But, I'd like still like to have both MacBooks keep their own library. We both manage syncing to iDevices by "sync only checked songs..." so we need our own version of what is checked and unchecked along with our own smart playlists.

Is what I'm trying to do possible? What if I play games with symlinks on the NAS (it's a Linux box running Samba and netatalk.)
My solution for that is having only one computer managing the library. First it was a PC running iTunes for Windows. Then, I moved to Ubuntu and started using Banshee for both managing the library and keeping my iPod updated. Finally, I have a Mac Book Pro and I have moved back to iTunes.

The Linux server, running both Samba and Netatalk, acts also as a mediacenter (with XBMC) that shares music also over uPNP, so I can access and play music from virtually any network device, even from the Internet.

In the past I've tried other schemas involving iTunes and network filesystems and it always turned into a headache.