Synching iTunes Libraries Take 2: Syncopation

Woo! Long-time reader, first-time poster. :)

I just gave Syncopation a try for my own weird situation. It didn't "Just Work," unfortunately, but I did eventually get everything working after a few days of fiddling with it in my spare time.

My partner and I have two distinctly different iTunes libraries on my Macbook. My library has podcasts and videos in it, whereas hers doesn't. Both libraries are stored on an external hard drive. For convenience's sake, we were syncing our iPod to her library. Now she spends most of her time at a Vista desktop.

What I wanted to do was pull back all of the song play counts, ratings and additions for music, and all those videos and podcasts (with metadata). So I logged in both users, fired up Syncopation on both of them and started it up.

The biggest problems I encountered revolved around Syncopation insisting on using ~/Library/AppSupport for its temp directory. In theory it stashes one iTunes file at a time, drops it onto iTunes, updates the metadata, erases the temp file and moves on.

This worked great until the external drive filled up. Now iTunes is saying, "There's not enough room to import all these files," and it's queuing them. Which means now my temp directory on the system drive is filling up. Somehow, the metadata update process also got out of step with the file import process and I started getting music and movie files *tagged with the correct iTunes metadata from another file*.

It was quite a mess, and I ended up deleting a lot of imported files because of it (mismatching album art, pulled from the file itself, tipped me off to this).

Fortunately, once I hosed out the Incoming directory and deleted the videos and podcasts that had made it across from the source library, everything started working again.

Kind of a tedious process, but I did get my libraries where I wanted them to be. Unfortunately, I am now in a position where I would like to sync her library on the Macbook with her Vista desktop. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this series to see if there's any easy fire-and-forget app I could use.

I was thinking of writing a script that mounted her Vista library as a SMB/CIFS share, walked her iTunes repository to build up a checklist, then checked off every file in the Mac iTunes Library XML as it found them. That would at least give me the filenames that needed to be transferred and imported.

Thanks Erica for trying all this out and letting us know! It is much appreciated. Any chance you could do a piece on iPhoto synchronization next? Something where you import your photos on one Mac and have it synchronize to all the other Macs as they join the network? [if it could synchronize to PCs as well, that'd be a huge plus]

I have TuneRanger installed on 2 PCS and one Mac Book Pro. The software installed and worked as I wanted. I don't really understand the negatives expressed in the original review since it was not my experience at all. I did read the read manual and followed the tutorial, maybe that explains the difference in results.

I did experience one hiccup when I first installed it because I didn't understand what a firewall was and tried to use it without messing with them. A quick visit to the website confirmed I had to turn them off in order for things to work. Also, my Mac is connected using wifi to my router while the PCs are wired and I can confirm that performance on wifi is orders of magnitude slower than on my wired connections. That said, it works.

MyTuneSync syncs also Windows PC libraries.

i may have a use for this, but i need it to sync always only 1 way, main library to 2 subordinate libraries, AND i want to convert from 256 to 128 in the process. can that be done with this or any?

I use PowerTunes to share a single library across multiple accounts on the same Mac. This works well, and means either account can add tracks, etc... with them showing up immediatly in either accounts iTunes. However the downside of this is that you can only have one iTunes account, which is annoying if you ave seperate iPhones etc... (PowerTunes solves this by allowing you to switch between whole iTunes folders, obviously a bit of a compromise but there you go.)

The problem with using a single library locaton for a variey of macs, is that adding tacks from one iTunes will not update across all the other iTunes, as iTunes cannot be persuaded to monitor it's own library folder, or in fact any folder. Does anybody know a way of doing this?

Just wanted to say thank you for reviewing all the iTunes syncing apps out there. I tried Slingshot and didn't have great luck--I ended up with doubles of a bunch of files.

So, before I try another sync app, I'm waiting for you to finish this series of reviews.

Thanks for taking the time to try them all, so your readers don't have to!

Any way to impoer music in iTunes without letting iTunes copy all mp3 files in the iTunes folder. Lots of disk space is wasted in having copies of all mp3 files in iTunes folder as well. ?

If I need to sync my iTunes library between two computers, I do this:

1. Mount a shared a drive/folder from another computer; e.g. using Finder "Connect to Server"

2. Run rsync; e.g.

rsync -av /iTunes_folder/iTunes /Volumes/remote_folder/

This will leave an iTunes directory on the other computer. Metadata is intact; if it was originally in the iTunes directory, it is now on the remote machine. Use this method to back up your iTunes library to an external hard drive, or NAS, too.

Sure, no fancy UI, but iTunes sync did come built in with your Mac :-)

I have my iTunes library on a NAS how can I share my library across 3 pc's Its there a quick and easy way to have them all point my NAS?

Heres my deal I cant seem to fix. I can access my music on my iMac but not the mini thats in my living room. I have my iTunes remote configured on my iPhone to talk to my iTunes in the living room which is connected to my receiver but the mini has a small HD how can I have both machines use the same library.

Share your library doesnt work good with the remote as its seen as an additional library not the " library "