How do I configure Home Sharing in iTunes 9?

"iTunes 9 appears to allow you to share the libraries between two computers provided that the purchased items in the libraries are authorized for the same apple id.

Assuming that all of the machines have itunes 9 and have the same apple id authorized to access the purchased items:

First machine - start Home Sharing.
iTunes will ask you to enter the account password and then turn on Home Sharing.

Second machine - start Home Sharing.
iTunes will ask you to enter the account password and then turn on Home Sharing.
You should see the first machine's library with a Home Icon.

It may take a while to share the contents of the library but eventually you can expand the first machine library and see all of the files.

The Home Sharing feature makes use of BonJour so if you haven't been using BonJour for anything else, make sure that your firewall allows mDNS traffic (multicast, UDP - port 5353 or 5354) and make sure that it allows the iTunes data on port 3698 as well.

You can check boxes to enable automatic sharing of purchased content and iTunes will offer to sync purchased content at that point. This didn't work for me, but as an alternative you can also view just the items from the first library that are missing from the second library and manually copy them.

Its not clear that the playlists can be automatically synced.

For versions of iTunes before 9, myTuneSync provides functionality that will periodically sync all of the items in iTunes except applications but including playlists. It will also sync bits of metadata like the skip count, play count, last play time, etc."

"I believe it might be fully automatic via bonjour. I just clicked on the menu item ""Home Sharing"", entered my apple ID and it says:

Use the same account ""my@email"" when turning on Home Sharing for your other computers. They will then appear below Shared in iTunes window."