Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Audio, iPod Family, iTunes, Apple
iTunes 7 supports 'reverse syncing'
iTunes 7 introduces a new feature called 'reverse syncing.' What's that all about? Well, let's say you have two Macs; one at home and one at work. You have all your music on your home Mac, but you sure would like to get it onto your work computer. Past iterations of iPod/iTunes would only allow you to sync with that home Mac and nothing else. Now you can sync with that home computer, and then hook your iPod up to another machine and get your content from the iPod onto the second machine.
There is one catch. This only works with videos/audio that were purchased from the iTunes Store, and all the computers that you are syncing with have to be authorized to play the content (so that's up to 5 computers, either Mac or PC).
This feature is still cool, and I am sure the RIAA didn't want Apple to make it easy to 'reverse sync' stolen music, but what about all those MP3's that I ripped from my CD's? Those are mine, fair and square.
Baby steps, I suppose.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
dang! said 5:21PM on 9-12-2006
that's lame... i was really excited when I saw this feature. Why bother if it's only for purchases?? I guess the thinking is that it's easy to bring a CD you own to work... but what if you own 200?? Very annoying--why even bother.
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Lasse said 5:22PM on 9-12-2006
anyone else noticed the car integration page links to the manufacturers?
http://www.apple.com/ipod/carintegration.html
Try Nissan...
...they could at least have checked after uploading. :)
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Thorn said 5:31PM on 9-12-2006
It stops the average Joe (you know, the guy that doesn't know about the 50 other tools that do this) from bringing his iPod in to work and passing it around to his friends, sharing the 60GB of stuff that he ripped himself.
By limiting it to DRM'ed songs, Apple's doing exactly what the RIAA wants.
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Troy McClure SF said 5:47PM on 9-12-2006
...what about all those MP3's that I ripped from my CD's?
Enable Disk Mode?
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Bill Jepson said 5:55PM on 9-12-2006
I use Martian SlingShot ( http://www.martian.com ) for copying music between iTunes on two computers. Works pretty good....TUAW covered it a while ago.
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Jon said 6:05PM on 9-12-2006
I was just thinking "if it only works for authorized computers, then that would keep people from sharing with friends." Then I realized you could just auth/deauth the target computer...
I wouldn't mind having iTunes put some implementation of FairPlay on my own music that would restrict it to "authorized" devices if it would give me this kind of easy portability between my own devices. That should at least be offered as an option.
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Tim Buck said 6:06PM on 9-12-2006
Did anyone else have problems getting iTunes 7.0 to run on Windows? I installed it on my work PC (running Windows XP Pro), and every time I launched it I got an error dialog:
MSVC++ Runtime Library
Error R6025
- pure virtual function call
I have since revered to iTunes 6 since 7 won't run.
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Ringo said 6:13PM on 9-12-2006
I cant even install iTunes 7.0 on my mac. no matter how many times i try, everytime i start iTunes it still says version 6.5 - "even" after rebooting. it doesnt who up in the software update either. no idea...
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Blair said 6:17PM on 9-12-2006
Ringo: You probably have 2 different copies of iTunes on your Mac. Did you move the original copy to a different folder at some point?
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Marco F. said 6:34PM on 9-12-2006
a littlebit offtopic but:
why can't itunes handle duplicates properly? that's still a crappy manual labour job...
and: TOCF (the Original Cover Flow) had the option to hide albums w/o art... I want that back!
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MacAddict said 6:36PM on 9-12-2006
Now that the iPod can reverse sync, I hope Apple or car audio makers will create an iTunes head unit. Screw all these cables, connectors, FM transmitters, ect. Just plug your iPod into the head unit and sync it. Done.
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ChillyWilly said 6:41PM on 9-12-2006
Ok, one of the features that I was initially excited about, but now that I see how limited it is, it's lost it's luster. Pass.
At least there's a lot of other cool features in iTunes 7 that are advances.
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Barry Williams said 7:12PM on 9-12-2006
Another interesting feature not advertised is a 'backup' facility accessed from File > Backup to Disc... offering options to backup the entire library to disc or only the new files since the last backup!!
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David said 7:35PM on 9-12-2006
important - This feature will allow remote sales, (ie: the long-rumored Airport Kiosks)...the no reverse syncing was always the holdup for that
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Scott said 7:48PM on 9-12-2006
While this features could certainly be better if you could transfer your whole library, it is a great leap forward to be able to purchase music on multiple computers (work, home, spouses, etc) without having to worry about emailing the song, or burning it to a cd to transfer. It's still a big deal.
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Matthew Sayler said 8:22PM on 9-12-2006
Is there anything like Slingshot that understands iTunes metadata well enough to sync changes to (eg) ratings? I know there are lots of "issues" with this but I'm curious if anyone has anything even resembling a solution.
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Riine said 8:37PM on 9-12-2006
Is it possible to write a utility that will transform the songs that we have prior to iTunes into DRM versions so that we can do this? I am unfamiliar with how the DRM thingy works.
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solomalee said 2:40AM on 9-13-2006
LOL #17
The lone voice in the dark that actually wants to DRM music
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chris said 3:23AM on 9-13-2006
I don't actually care too much about DRM, although ripping my CDs and then not 'reverse syncing'? Oh well, I have ephPod.
What I really want iTunes to do is to deal with PlayCounts better. They are the cornerstone of my listening - e.g. my smart playlist of unplayed podcasts, my top tracks that I've not heard in 'a while' - but I share an iTunes library with my girlfriend's iPod as well as mine as well as using AirportExpress to listen from another machine on my wireless network. I want iTunes to be able to ignore (or recategorise) 'other' iPods that aren't mine (but are registered to that installation) but consider plays from the LAN.
It shouldn't be so hard, should it?
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Ringo said 5:25AM on 9-13-2006
@9: finally got it to work. the reason was probably that I was using a non standard library from my exernal harddrive. once I switched back to normal library (using iTunes Library Manager script) iTunes 7 started to work.
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