My three daughters have each received a £40 iTunes voucher for Xmas. As they don’t want anybody else using their ‘money’, what’s the best way to use them so they only buy from their own account?
Currently we have just one Apple ID (mine) but they each have their own user account on the Mac.

Set them up an Apple ID each through their computer account.

Move the current iTunes library to the shared folder in the users folder. (macintoshhd/users/shared)

Do a get info for the new music folder and ensure it ignores ownership, all users must be able to read and write to the folder else you get strange errors when downloading.

Point each accounts iTunes library to the new shared folder using the advanced section of the preference pane for iTunes.

While there untick the copy files to iTunes media folder (failure to do this and you end up with 4 of each track at the next step).

Starting with an empty music window in iTunes import all your music stuff back into iTunes for each account. When clearing, if it asks to trash files DON’T!!

Presto everyone gets to share all the music.

As tracks get added by others from the store you can import into each user account by selecting the music folder using the import command (keep the copy files to library box un-ticked unless you have files on your computer you wish to move to the library).

Redeem vouchers as normal for each user account.

This will simplify back-up as there is only one large folder to do for the music and films etc.

Nice one Butty, well put.
Cheers 🙂

As is usual with these things it will take a while to do. The offspring can keep you fuelled with coffee or beer.

if they each want to control what they spend their iTunes vouchers on then they need an Apple ID and iTunes account each.

Sandwich’s workaround gives an interesting way to share a common location for music/apps/books but doesn’t deal with spending the money. I can see that this way would allow users to control what music they could ‘see’ in iTunes. And it would allow them to add music that others would not immediately see. However, once you’ve added one £40 voucher to the iTunes account then anyone using that Apple ID can spend it. It might be easier to keep a record of what each one buys if they’re too young for an iTunes account.

If you stick with one Apple ID/iTunes account then iTunes Match offers an easy way to share one library between different users without too much (local) storage overhead.

Try reading the first line again. It just works 😉

Gone with sandwiches method and although it takes a bit of time it seems to work great, although creating the apple ID was tricky (kept throwing errors).
All good now.