Good, interesting, and important piece at Macworld.com by Kirk McElhearn about a much-needed, centralized iTunes server. I just want to add one more point.
iTunes Home Sharing, in my opinion, fails in one very significant way, and that has to do with how it works with any of the iDevices associated with an iTunes library.
The way that home sharing works at present is, if my iPhone is linked and synced with my laptop, but my music, apps, movies, and so forth are stored on another computer, the only way to get that media onto my iPhone is to first copy it to my local iTunes library before I sync my iPhone. Even though I have a legit and authorized Home Sharing relationship between my Macbook Pro and my central library, there is no way for me to copy the media file directly from the Home Share to my linked and equally legit iDevice. That means that I now have duplicate media on my Macbook and in the centralized library. This is totally inefficient.
Now, multiply this by the several Macs I have on my network and the 8-10 iDevices I have in my house. For every user on every Mac there is a separate iTunes library. For those same users there may be 1-2 iDevices associated with those libraries. So, say, if there’s a copy of the movie UP in the central library, and 4 users on a single Mac with 4 separate user accounts wants to have UP on their iDevice, in order for them to sync with their iDevice there will need to be 4 copies of UP on the Mac.
This is, in a word, ridiculous!
If Apple doesn’t create a Server version of iTunes, (And I’m with McElhearn on this, I’ve long thought that they should) at the very least Apple should make it possible for users to copy Home Shared media directly to an authorized iDevice without first having to copy it to the local iTunes library.