Geek Tip of Day: sharing iTunes metadata

So one of the big issues with trying new OS's is invariably that you have some things set the way you like them and sometimes it's a royal pain setting that up again. Well, for me iTunes is one of the biggies. It might have to do with enjoying structure, organization, and useless information, but over the last 2 years iTunes has kept track of my vast library of music, recording ratings, play counts, lyrics, ablum artwork, and all kinds of other fun information. One of my worries has been what will happen the next time I need to reload windows or, as it more presently applicable, try out Windows 7? So my situation is that I am now dual booting between Vista and 7, and I want to be able to play music via iTunes and have the metadata library kept up-to-date and synchronized between the two systems. Today I have learned the solution. My music and the metadata for iTunes is stored on my D: drive, which is accessible by both systems. The trick that I learned is when starting iTunes, if you hold down the shift key it asks you to either start a new iTunes library or to direct it to an existing one. Doing this while in Windows 7, I was able to get iTunes to work with the same library file that it uses while in Vista. Now I can happily go between Vista and 7 without the stress of having to keep everything up-to-date manually or the horror of unsaved and unorganized music :) Which, considering I have about 25GB of music, would be annoying, to say the least.