SweetMacTips

What you need are the Xiph QuickTime components. Download and install the plugin bundle into /Library/Components. If iTunes was open when you did this, quit and re-launch it. You should now be able to play all the xiph codec formats (including Flac)

Cheers!

You could just use iTunes you know :)  Hit the green + button and you’ll get something like this:

It’ll just hover anywhere you put it.  You can even make it smaller by grabbing the lower right corner and dragging:

If you use Spaces, assign iTunes to all of your spaces and it’ll stay put when you switch Spaces.

Voila!

Any USB hard drive should do (and actually that Passport is a nice drive). I suspect the reason you ran into problems with your other one is due to the format the drive came in, likely FAT32.

You should re-format your drive to use HFS+ with Disk Utility so it works as you expect. FAT32 has a 4GB per file limit to it. That may be a reason your movies got toasted as movie capture files can easily get over 4GB a piece. I shoot in full on HD 1080P and GBs disappear by the hundreds.

If you partition your external drive, you can use one partition for Time Machine and the other as regular data. You can then move your iTunes to that partition. See Apple’s support article here for doing that.

I start with updating iTunes to the latest. If that doesn’t cure your ills, I’d toss the preferences for iTunes.

Shut down iTunes and if you go in your home folder/Library/Preferences, there are some com.apple.iTunes files. Toss all those in the trash, it won’t hurt anything. Then re-open iTunes and see how you make out. Those files you tossed will re-create themselves. 

If that doesn’t work, try creating another account on your Mac and see if iTunes works ok in that account. I suspect you need to get this far but if you do, let me know. We’ll go from there when we get to that bridge.

Good luck!

Is it just that CD on her computer that freaks out or is it all CDs? It almost sounds like the optical drive is having trouble reading it and is giving up. If it’s all CDs, then I’d say there’s a service call in her future… In my experience, iTunes is very straightforward when it comes to audio CD handling.

UPDATE

I was able to copy and paste into the lyrics tab in iTunes 10 no problem.

This is actually a fairly tough nut to crack: having full control over an iTunes library from more than 1 computer. You’d think it shouldn’t be that hard, right? It seems like various methods leave out something important (like the ability to create playlists, sync with an iPhone etc).

It all comes down to one thing: The iTunes Library file. It’s a database that keeps track of all of your music. Thing is, it was never meant to be opened by more than one user at a time. So, even though you could have the entire library (including database file) on a shared location, the first person that opens their iTunes up will lock the database file. What will happen is that the second person will get a warning when iTunes is opened on their computer and won’t be able to go further.

I went through this for awhile myself as I wanted all of the Macs in the house to be pointed to one library on the server in the basement (we’re talking 4 machines here, including a Linux box).  The other issue that I ran into is that you’d have other people’s stuff in “your” library. 

We ended up splitting out the music to our own machines again after the headache and I just made sure everyone was backing up to the networked Time Machine.

Wish I had a better answer for you. Perhaps one of the other readers has an idea I haven’t thought of.

Look here.

(Referring to this)

There’s a variety of ways to transfer it. External hard drive, burn to DVD, over a network, pull out the hard drive of the Windows machine and plug it into your Mac in a variety of ways…

I didn’t get specific because there’s just about a ba-jillion ways of doing it.

Yep! Right here.