Sync iPod -> iTunes on 2 PC’s

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Hi, everybody. I am a long-term Wintel user, but I have grown to love iTunes and my new 20GB iPod. (Actually it was an HP-branded iPod on closeout, but hey, it’s new to me.) I am trying to figure out how to sync my home PC and my work PC iTunes libraries. There is not a great deal of difference, but enough that it’s worth trying to do, and it would seem using the iPod is the way to do it. On the surface, it would seem to be an easy task; but, most of what I’m reading from my Google searches talk about how hard it is to do. And most of the posts/articles talk about Macs not PC’s. Does anyone have a suggestion (third party software, tweak iTunes and/or the iPod, etc.)?

Thanks and have a great day.

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Jim, you can’t do that with iTunes/iPods, it only allows you to use 1 computer as your library. the way to get around it would be to copy all of your music files from one computer to the other, and then sync from that one computer to get all of the songs. you can also use your iPod itself to do this, but it involves formatting the drive on the iPod and then re-installing the software for it. I’ve done it to move regular files from one computer to another so i know it works, but its a bit of a pain. you are probably better off burning CDs of the music and transferring it to the other computer, or if you have the CDs in hand, just re-ripping the music off of them.

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John, thanks for your reply. I guess the next step would be getting a list from each computer and figuring out the differences. For example, is it possible to print a list from the iTunes library to a text file and put the two lists side-by-side in Excel? That may not be ideal, just the first thing I thought of. Thanks again.

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you can do this a few ways….. i’m not at home right now so i don’t know if iTunes exports your library, but i know Winamp can. you don’t need to keep the player, its just what i would use to export the library (assuming iTunes can’t) into a format you could copy into excel. First go to iTunes’ library tab and see if you can export it via the File menu or even right clicking inside the library window. if not, try out winamp.

another thing to keep in mind: if the song titles are even slightly different, your excel spreadsheet formulas won’t catch it unless you do some special manipulation or manually hack through it. then all you need in excel is a lookup to see which songs are on what computer.

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Indeed there is an Export feature. Click File, then Export Song Library. It produces a delimited file that Excel opens easily. (I noticed my library at work is partially on my hard drive and partially on my network drive, so I suppose I should fix that.) I have less than 1000 songs at work, so it shouldn’t be too big a job to find the gaps between here and home — I hope. Thanks again.

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Hey Jim! I saw your message earlier today, but couldn’t get to it at that time.

I found this post over at http://www.ilounge.com[/url%5D. ilounge.com is a huge iPod community. Maybe you’ve been there before? This particular post says you can’t sync / copy with iTunes, but does say there are other third party options.

The articles page at the same site has a tonne of ideas. Possibly something there could help you.

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Chris, thank you. I went to the site. I didn’t see anything helpful right off, and one of the links was a dead-end. There was a suggestion to have Windows “see” the iPod as an extra hard drive, so that may be worth looking into. (I have two programs that will sync folders.) I will continue to check there since I may have missed something. Thanks again!

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Having windows see it as an external drive is what i was referring to earlier in this thread. It may not be worth doing if you can just burn a CD of the files and bring them from one computer to the other because of the hassle of first formatting the drive (to make it a normal external drive), then transferring the files, then re-installing the Apple software on to the iPod. It would also be just as easy if you had a USB Jump drive to move the files from one computer to the other (this is essentially what the iPod becomes when you format it).

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A lot of this thread has lost me completely, but this is what works for me:

• There’s a hard drive folder designated as my Library. The iPod I have is synched to that. I make sure that the contents of that folder are never larger than the iPod’s capacity.
• Any Library Exports are done using the XML file feature – but something else may work just as well for others.
• Before making a Library Import, I back up the existing list (using Export). Then using Ctrl+A, I select the entire iTunes library & delete it.
• On the Import, where necessary iTunes gives an error message – saying it has suppressed “files it couldn’t find”. Copying over from the iPod & rerunning the Import usually sorts this out.
• Then run the File|Add Folder to Library on the folder that has just been synched to see whether there are any files in there that were not in the Imported Library.[/list]HTH

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