Comments on: Downsides to Auto Downloading For iTunes Purchases

By: Dave Mac

Dave Mac — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:04:36 +0000

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3819

By: Dave Mac

Dave Mac — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:02:24 +0000

Oh, and you must select ONE iTunes ID as the Home Sharing ID… like a master account that ties everything together.

Once you turn on Home Sharing with each ID, then the other account shows up under “Shared” on the left bar of iTunes. The Settings and Import buttons are on the lower right.

By: Joe Tomasone

Joe Tomasone — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:45:32 +0000

In reply to Dave Mac. Hmm, somehow I missed that. I'll give that a whirl and see if it fixes things up. Thanks for the heads up, Dave!

By: Dave Mac

Dave Mac — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:42:54 +0000

Actually, you are mistaken. Ever since Home Sharing, each family member (up to 5, I think) can have a separate iTunes ID, and be authorized to copy all of the Music, Apps, Books, Tv Shows, etc. They are copied each time iTunes is opened on their account, or you can selectively choose whether a specific category is automatically copied, or it can all be managed manually. In this case, there is a drop down to see what items the other user has, but you don’t. You can then import those.

Two caveats… each time you update the apps, say on the iPhone, if it was purchased by another user, the popup shows that iTunes ID and you must input that password.

Also, the new Automatic Downloading with iTunes in the Cloud appears to only allow it to be turned on for one user on each computer.

By: Alicia

Alicia — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:13:04 +0000

Music not working for me – only books and apps. Wonder if this is a U.S. only thing…

By: jhrogersii

jhrogersii — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:41:59 +0000

As far as downloading of music and apps goes, I believe we saw a purchase history in the demo. We should be able to manually go in there and select what we want to re-download to each individual device.

By: jhrogersii

jhrogersii — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:39:25 +0000

Not necessarily. Apple has never put any kind of restrictions on family use of accounts. They might like to, but I think they are smart enough to know what a disastrous PR move that would be.

Apple already allows multiple Game Center handles under a single Apple iTunes account. I would imagine that the same will apply to the new messaging service.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:36:37 +0000

The thing is, the “device owner” that you speak of is really supposed to be your iTunes account. And that’s the issue. Apple expects it to be one user per account and one user per device. They’d have to do something kind of like Netflix where there is the main account, but multiple users allowed.

By: Max

Max — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:30:21 +0000

As far as the data usage problem goes, I haven’t looked on my iPad, but on the iPhone you have the option to turn cellular usage on and off for downloading purchases. If not connected to a wifi network and with cellular usage turned off, your automatic downloads won’t happen until a wifi network is found.