I'm hoping that there's a resolution for this, but I'm not so sure at the moment. Some scripts seem to deal with areas of this problem but not the entire thing.

I have a large music library located on a network share \\gizmo\music. iTunes is set up on my machine (an iMac) to NOT manage my music and all tracks are referenced as being in \Volumes\Music which directly corresponds to the above SMB share.

So, in a nutshell my stuff works fine.

Now, here's where we get into trouble.

My wife, who has a macbook pro, IS set up to have iTunes manage her music, since she wants to take said music on the road with her on the Macbook. She has used the Library sharing feature, etc, to copy a large chunk of my music onto her MBP.

Her music path references her local file system and also only references the locations on her personal directory for given albums (for example, on the SMB share all of the album folders have the year in the album folder).

What I am trying to do is export her playlists and bring them in to my Mac, without creating duplicate copies, etc, of any of the music. These playlists would then be exported for use with other music servers I have so that her playlists would be accessible and properly reference the SMB network path that is correct for a given music title (I regularly export my playlists in .m3u format using iTunes Exporter for example and it works great).

Is there any way to export her playlists and then import them on my machine so that my machine attempts to locate the given tracks in my existing library and not need to re-import them?

Thanks.

To provide a bit more information, and possibly help solicit a solution, here's a bit more information.

Mac foo has the same music tracks that Mac bar has.

However, in the library for foo, the volume information shows up like this;

\Volumes\music\good album 2008\good song 1\

In the library for bar the pathing shows up like this;

\user\me\good album\good song 1

So, both libraries have the same track data but different information about where it is located.

Can a script be created that will take the XML exported playlist from the 2nd Mac and then find the correct track already in the library in the 1st Mac so that the track does not have to be re-copied or imported?

This would allow for the import of the 2nd users playlists into the 1st users Machine and still have all tracks play correctly.

Would also then allow for export of the 2nd users playlists into .m3u format through utilities like iTunes Exporter and have them play correctly.