One PC, One Mac, One iPod?

[ilan27]

Hey guys, I have a little dilemma I'm hoping someone can solve. My wife and I are buying an iPod this week (after the announcement) for our one-year wedding anniversary (which is today). Here's our situation:

I have a Dell Dimension PC, 160 GB hard drive, about 80 gigs free currently. My wife has an iBook, 60 GB hard drive, about 45 gigs free currently. We both have iTunes and have been splitting our music library onto each computer -- I have around 8 gigs loaded, and she has 5 gigs on hers. No songs repeated. We have more than enough music to fill three 60 GB iPods, so we're trying to only upload what we really want.

So, here's what we want to do: Be able to use the iPod with both my PC and her Mac. It would mean manually managing our music. We understand that, and it's fine. But what I've gotten completely conflicting answers about is whether this is possible or not. The amount of free space on our computers doesn't really allow either one of us to put 60 or 80 GB of music on it -- we want to split up our collection, and continue adding music to our iPod from BOTH computers.

I've heard from several people that as long as the iPod is formatted for Windows, you can definitely do this. On the other hand, an Apple employee told me that this ISN'T possible.

We're totally confused over here. Can anyone shed any light!? Thank you so much -- any and all help is appreciated!

Ilan & Gemma

[hotphil]

AFAIK a PC formatted iPod is readable on both a PC and a Mac. I think difficulties come when attaching it to different installs of iTunes as they like to be tied to one "pairing".
I think you've got several options (probably not an exhaustive list!):
- if you must connect them to different computers, don't use iTunes to manage the music on the iPods
- upgrade the hard drives in one or both of the computers and keep each iPod only synced with one computer
- buy an external USB hard drive that could be attached to each computer and used for the library

[ilan27]

hotphil --
Thanks for your reply. Having differing installs of iTunes won't be a problem. However, I'm not sure why you suggest that I not use iTunes for both computers?

[hotphil]

I think (and others who have experience of this situation may correct me) that if you sync an iPod with an iTunes installation and then try to sync it with another iTunes installation, it wipes the iPod and syncs with only the files from the "new" installation/pairing. I believe you have to use another application to transfer to/from iPod if you wish to connect it to multiple computers.
If you're keeping "1 iPod:1PC" you'll be OK, but if you wish to connect iPod 1 to PC 2 and vice versa you may run into issues if you're using iTunes.
It's not something I do, so can't claim to be too knowledgable - just what I've picked up from reading some other threads. I hope I'm not misinterpreting!!
Might be worth a trawl through the Articles section to see if there's anything in there.

[ilan27]

Phil -- "I think (and others who have experience of this situation may correct me) that if you sync an iPod with an iTunes installation and then try to sync it with another iTunes installation, it wipes the iPod and syncs with only the files from the "new" installation/pairing. I believe you have to use another application to transfer to/from iPod if you wish to connect it to multiple computers.""

By a different iTunes installation, do you mean something like version 5.0 vs. 5.0.1?

[hotphil]

No, I mean that you'll have a copy of iTunes on your computer and another copy on your wife's. I think you'll have problems if you try to sync your iPod on your wife's computer and vice versa.

[ilan27]

Would it be alright if I didn't sync on either computer? If I manually managed on both computers?

[manveru]

I think you are right. As long as you dont sync on either you should have no problems at all. I used a third generation ipod (pc formatted) and managed manually and never experienced any data loss... (until I dropped it last week and killed the hard drive).

So now I want to add to the question at hand. Can a pc formatted ipod still sync with a mac?

I want to manually manage my music (as it is on both machines) but I want to sync it with iCal on my mac.

[ilan27]

Thanks manveru! That gives me hope... I ordered the 60 GB black iPod today... can't wait for it to get here!

[aaronius]

I have the same situation - I have a Mac, but most of the other computers I interact with are PCs. A slightly different twist on the original question: is it possible to be able to use the iPod's external drive functionality on both Mac and Windows systems without reformats in between? I only use Itunes on the Mac computer at home, so there wouldn't be song management issues--I just want to be able to copy, say, some text files from my Mac to the IPod and then plug it into my friend's Windows machine and see them. Is this possible?

[hotphil]

I believe a Windows-formatted iPod can be read as a hard drive by both PC and Mac.

[manveru]

(Confirmed with 5G)

mac format = drive recognized as ipod using iTunes on mac, but not on PC

windows format = drive recognized as ipod using iTunes on both mac and PC

If it is mac format you can still use other software (anapod, ephpod) to transfer files to the drive using a pc (but itunes wont recognize it).

As far as using it as a storage drive... I know windows format can be used in this manner on both systems.

Also I was able to sync my windows formatted ipod with iphoto and ical.

So... Best solution is to format with windows and you should not be restricted at all.