Sync 2 itunes libraries, 2 computers.

Well I just got spam for this: http://my.smithmicro.com/win/tuneranger/ which seems to fit the bill.

B

OH YESSSSS... I have been wondering if this can be done for months now.. it would be absolutely ideal to have this functionality..... however can it not be done officially through itunes and have the other library appear as a device or something of the nature and choose to sync selectively...

say somebody has a MBA and a Mac Pro and they want to take music they want with them on the go.... and they have an 80gb harddisk and they only want to take with them 10gb worth of music.... or they happen to download a few albums while away or rip a few cds.. it would be easy if the two itunes libraries could sync over a network or wifi..

I just want to do it between two mac laptops.

I think a program called RsyncX may work.

pmayor said:

I just want to do it between two mac laptops.

I think a program called RsyncX may work.

Click to expand...

RsyncX will keep the files in sync, but won't know how to manage conflicts between the two libraries. (i.e. playcounts, playlists, ratings, ... if they are changed on one Mac, what should happen to the other?).

B

That's pretty awesome if it works well.

What's your experience? Does it do Podcasts too?

I bought it yesterday and I've been playing with it.

I'm a little disappointed that it's a bit slower than watching paint dry - you'd think actions like this between a 3.2Ghz Octocore (Mac) and a 3.8Ghz Quadcore (Win) on an HP switch over Cat6 would go a little faster. The Mac went into sleep before the copy was anywhere near done.

No sign of Podcasts yet. The Music library tracks are syncing though, complete with playcounts.

It is desperately slow. And crashy. Two hangs so far, my library is still not synced... and I'd like to do this with at least 3 machines on a twice daily basis.

Hope it's better for incremental syncs...

If you have two macs you can share libraries I know. That would play stuff from the other mac and so on. As far as the pc, I'm interested in doing the same as well.... Also looking for a easy fix.

So - well, once the initial sync is done, Tuneranger does seem to work more or less usably... but I don't have full confidence in the sync at this time, as the track numbers don't match up. And every time I do a subsequent sync, even one after another, it wants to sync different files - not a good sign.

I'm going to poke around a bit on that front to see why.

Edit: Podcasts do sync, but their state doesn't. Not good for me.

Ooookaay....

It's gone and deleted a bunch of stuff during the various syncs, and not saved them where the settings say they should be. Just as well I always work on a copy of my library, eh? I'd be quite hopping mad if it was my actual library.

I'm sure if you work the way it does it will probably work, but it doesn't do enough - most crucially in the podcast area - to use it as anything other than a (toe-numbingly slow) migration tool, and even then with some suspicion.

Any other suggestions?

I wish apple would make an official solution for this.... and still it would be cool legally as one may authorize 5 computers per itunes library.. so theres no question of it doing anything to piracy...

Actually tuneranger sounds like what I've been looking for -- I'm on a small ethernet network at home with two laptops. I'm going to give it a try.

However, your experience doesn't sound very promising.

You're right about it being slow. I can't even get it to recognize my remote iTunes library ... and this is using two mac laptops.

The problem must be with TuneRanger. It doesn't seem to be a well-written program. I've had to force quit out of it twice now.

I sent an email to cust. support. Maybe that will help.

Currently I'm trapped in the "spinning color wheel" state of being -- if I try and click on the TuneRanger program. It may be simply because I have a very large library ... but still, a well-written program should let you know what it is doing, not just seem to be caught in a loop.

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EDIT: Later it seemed to be working after I forced myself to read the directions. I didn't know you had to have the TuneRanger installed on both computers, then I had to make sure I had the right type of sync function selected. But after it seemed for a few minutes to be working I get this message: "The remote computer is not a TuneRanger Server. Please upgrade the remote machine to a TuneRanger Server."

Not sure why you would think from the outset it only needed to be on one computer, but that's not the problem - it is usable speedwise on an incremental sync, but it is still fairly slow and what concerns me most is that I'm not 100% confident of the sync results. Perhaps more tweaking is required. I'm not really seeing any other viable options, so this might be it. It just bugs me immensely that Podcast states are not maintained in sync since this is the facility I really want.

Well I have not been able to get it to work and I have not heard any response from customer service.

There's nothing unusual about my set-up, either. I have a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook G4 connected via ethernet. All other communications work fine (file sharing, etc.). So I have no idea why TuneRanger doesn't work.

any updates on this? Id like to do this as well..

Nah. It more or less works, but I can't rely on it for iTunes sync in the same way as I can rely on Microsoft Synctoy for file syncing for example, where I do it and I know it's done without having to sift through the results log. It's not fully stable either - although it seems to be better under Windows than OS X.

Probably will work

I haven't had time to get back to giving it a try -- but I did hear from tuneranger customer service, and they said I need to be sure I have my firewall disabled. That is most likely what the problem was, so once I've disabled that I see no reason why it won't work. The other problem I'm having is just the size of my itunes library. I really need to spend some time and delete old podcasts I don't need, because the library itself is too large to fit on my PowerBook that has a smaller hard drive.

I just bought TuneRanger and it doesn't work

I just bought TuneRanger and it doesn't work. I also have a Mac and a PC and my PC holds my main iTunes library and the Mac I occasionally use to DJ. I was hoping to sync the two using TuneRanger but there are so many problems. Even after disabling the firewall the sync fails. I have more than 11,000 songs so maybe that's part of it.

I have managed to successfully sync a single playlist, but it is out of order. The developer has confirmed this to be a bug that won't be fixed in the forseeable future.

Bottom line is that TuneRanger is unreliable and it looks like others are having the same issues. Hopefully Apple itself will come up with a solution.