Yet another muliple PC syncing question...

[Diggit2001]

Hello everyone. I have searched the forums and read several posts from a few people asking various questions about syncing your iPod with more than one PC. I have so far been unable to find an answer to my specific quandary so I am asking here. I apologize if this has already been addressed elsewhere.

Anyway, I am the proud new owner of a 40GB G3 iPod that I hooked to my home PC (Win XP) and set up to sync with iTunes. (I have grown to love iTunes, BTW. Much better than Music Match IMO). I spent a long while recording most of my CD collection to my hard drive and now have about 35 GB of music to tote around with me. I also wanted to have access to my music on my laptop at work so I hooked the laptop to my home network and then copied all of my music to it. Since I have nothing better to do at work sometimes, I like to purchase a song or two from the iTunes Music Store and also work on rating my songs (a long tedious process). I do these same things from my home PC as well so I now pretty much have 2 separate music collections, one on my home PC and one on my work laptop. I currently only sync the iPod with the home PC. This brings me to my question, finally. If I were to go out and get an additional dock for my laptop, would I be able to successfully sync my iPod with both machines, transferring over all added music (from the music store or other CD's) and sync up all music ratings that I did so that I could just have 2 identical copies of the same music collection?

I hope I'm explaining this correctly. If anyone could lend a little advice on this matter, it would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance

-Chris

[ashawley]

The short answer is that you're not going to be able to sync your two collections. By definition, syncing can only happen between one music collection and your iPod--not two.

If you want to know the details behind it, you need to know a little about databases. Forgive me if you already know about all this..but I'll go into it for others.l

The iTunes library assigns a unique "song id" for each tune you have in the library. When you sync, this song id (a number actually) is written to the iPod's database. It basically says, "song #135 is Help, by the Beatles" for example. This let's both the iPod and iTunes know that any changes to song 135, whether on the iPod (i.e a rating) or in iTunes (such as changing the genre, album, composer, last played date etc), know which value to change in the database.

Now, if you try to sync from two separate iTunes libraries, you can imagine what might happen - each library could assign the same ID number to different songs. Then when you try to sync w/the iPod - well, you're asking for big trouble.

Does that make sense at all? Probably not.

If you want to move your music collection from your laptop to the iPod you can manually upload, but your last played, playcounts and ratings that you make on the iPod won't transfer to iTunes. Because it's not true syncing.

Me, I'd just copy the laptop tunes to the iPod as a hard drive, then connect your iPod to your home computer, move them off of the iPod and import them into iTunes. Then sync--but only sync from the home computer.

'Course, I'm weird that way.

Adam

[Snwstrm]

I have the exact same "problem" as the initiator. As I use the iPod a lot at work but are recommended not to use my company computer for private stuff, especially when it exceeds all the real project files with a few GB, there you are. But as I work a lot with mobile computers and syncing, the only real problem is finding the time to write the sync software.

To solve the problem, all you need to do is to have syncronized the time setting (somwhat) on all the computers/iPods involved. That way, when you leave one computer, it records the "last time synchronized" and when you return, it scans for any updates that has occured since that time and records them. It might be new files/songs or just updated info/rating. Great huh?

Now, all I have to do is to write it (or find someone else who has).

/Snwstrm

[Diggit2001]

Thanks for the help Adam, that all makes sense. What I ended up doing was heading over to download.com and trying out a bunch of file sync programs. I think I downloaded and evaluated 6 different apps and decided that "Beyone Compare 2.1" by Scooter Software best suited my needs. I now hook my work laptop up to my home network once a week and the program scans both music folders and then lets me know what the differences are. I then choose on a case by case basis if I want to syncronize to either the folder on the laptop or the folder on the desktop. This seems to be working pretty well for me and meets pretty much all of my requirements. If anyone is interested, Beyond Compare can be downloaded at www.scootersoftware.com. Its free for 30 days, but then you have to pay $30.00 to register it after that.

Thanks again for your help.

-Chris