Joe Wilcox over at Microsoft Monitor makes an exceptiionally good point in his post Make the Music Available to All

He’s pointing out the pain involved in making stuff available to multiple users on Home PC’s / Networks – that stuff being music / photo’s etc.

To quote him:

“Problem: Making music easily available to everyone. The music collection comes from four sources: CDs I ripped, purchased DRM content from MSN Music or Napster and subscription stuff from Yahoo! Music. Authorizing the computer to play DRM downloads or subscription music was easy enough. Making that content available to all three people wasn’t as easy.”
…
What I’d like to see is a common music database or content list easily made available to, at the least, Windows Media Player and, ideally, to other digital media software, too.

Because there is no simple mechanism is place, I had to open Windows Media Player under each user account and search through the 3,300 song library. Better would have been one search that made the list accessible to all three user’s Windows Media Player. I even went so far as to put all the songs in the Shared Music folder.”

It’s an excellent point – and a problem dear to my heart. This is one feature that would really make Vista a worthwhile upgrade for home users – Microsoft need to wake-up and realise that as well as making it secure, they REALLY need to work on “making it work” if it’s tricky for me as an MCSA to share music with my girlfriend on the PC we share at home and to make it available on my laptop as well – then what chance does the average Joe (sorry for the pun) have?