Vista - Share Permissions For Folders

My home TV service (AT&T U-Verse) allows for the playing of songs from a networked PC, over the TV and thus over the TV's sound surround speakers. For this to work, I need to allow all of my music folders/files to be shared. My music collection is housed in Itunes, which creates a folder for each artist, and sub folders for each album. I have about 4,000 songs, and 385 artists. "Beneath" these 385 folders for the artists, there is approximately another 700-800 sub folders. All of these folders/files are "not shared".

My question: How can I change all of the folders & files to "shared" WITHOUT having to do each one individually?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Share the containing folder instead of creating a gazillion individual subfolder shares. In other words, share "Music" instead of separately sharing "Music\Aardvark", "Music\ACDC"... "Music\ZZTop".

Creating hundreds or thousands of shares has negative effects on performance (because it chews precious and limited kernel resources) and security (because each of the shares has to be administered).

Remember copyright laws (okay, I'm a killjoy).

H2SO4: I'm not sure what you mean by "Share the containing folder instead of creating a gazillion individual subfolder shares". The file structure was created by Itunes and looks like this:
Folder: ITunes Music
....Sub-folder: AC-DC
............Sub-folder: Back In Black
...................................Hells Bells.mp3
...................................Shoot To Thrill.mp3
....................................etc.

I do not want to restructure the folders, simply because I do use Itunes on my PC.

Lemur: I hope you were joking when you mentioned copyright laws. My CDs, copied to my PC, played on my TV....no copyright infringement there.

Understood. I'm not suggesting you restructure your folders. That would be a nightmare.

By rights, you should only need one share - "ITunes Music", or whatever you choose to call the share that maps to that folder. Then to access individual artists and albums, you'd navigate the directory structure: access the share first, dig into the ACDC folder, then the "back in black" subfolder (good musical taste btw!), then pick the song you want played.

Unfortunately, if the "home TV service" cannot deal with the concept of folders and it expects all of the mp3s to be in a single folder, that could be a problem. Multiple shares are unlikely to help in that scenario.

"By rights, you should only need one share - "ITunes Music" or whatever you choose to call the share that maps to that folder."

I didn't get a chance last night to tinker around...but....Are you saying if I allow share rights on the main folder (ITunes Music), all subfolders & files are shared?

Thanks.

Yes. You'd access the "Itunes Music" share and then dig through the directory structure underneath to get to specific artists and albums.

By the way, a share doesn't have to have the same name as the folder it maps to. For example, you could share "C:\MyStuff\Itunes Music" as "Music". Then, when another device connects to \\YourComputer\Music, it would actually be browsing the content of the "Itunes Music" folder and its subfolders.