While doing my search.. I came across this site. Look familiar?
http://concepts-programming.blogspot.com/2009/02/linux-itunes-server.html

Just two things I realized while setting this up:

There is no reason to use -e with rsync if the ssh key is in the proper location.
rsync -av 192.168.1.3:/Users/dan/… would just work fine. But if it’s already set up like this there is no reason to change it…

I’m using rsync -av –delete, because I usually don’t want to keep the songs on the server if I deleted them locally…

I recently got an Ipod shuffle, and happily installed Itunes on my notebook(Windows Vista) to transfer some music. I mapped the music share on the NAS and added it as a share in Itunes and waited….and waited….etc.

Finally it finished doing whatever it was doing and I succesfully copied a few songs to the Ipod.

Now I’ve discovered that the NAS has a built’in Itunes Server function, which I have enabled, and it shows up nicely in the Itunes application.

So far so good(I’ll get to the point now, I promise), but I cannot figure out how to copy music from my iTunes server to the iPod.

I’m a newbie to this whole iPod/iTunes thing and just want to ask if you know if it should be possible to copy music from my own iTunes server to an(y) iPod?

thanks

What I do is buy music or rip CDs on my Mac, then a nightly cron job automatically backs up a copy of the music from my Mac and adds it to the Linux box’s library.

At that point, I have 2 copies of the song and if I were to browse both iTunes shares from a third computer, I would see the new song in both libraries. In the case of music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, if this third machine is authorized, it can play the music.

In theory, another step can be added so that any computer of the network gets updated with the latest music files from the server’s filesystem as well, if it needs a local copy instead of streaming from the network.

If the third machine is a Mac or Linux box, just add another rsync cron job. If it is a Windows machine, you would use its job scheduling mechanism.

From the description above, it looks like the server is set to share only, NOT to be used AS the library for other computers. So if you bought music on your iMac, that music would not be added to the linux server. You would have to transfer that manually. Which would be fine by me!

Have you tried ripping or purchasing music with one of your other PCs to see if the library for the Mac and the PC are updated with the new music?