Sync iTunes Media From Mac To PC Over A Network

One of the benefits of working in a school with Macs and PCs is that I get to collect plenty of handy utilities. On the downside, I’m often asked to do things for teachers that they could or should do themselves. For example, synchronize iTunes libraries between Macs and Windows PCs.

How would you do it? There’s actually a very easy way to sync iTunes libraries between Mac and PC and even iPods, and even across a network. The utility is called SuperSync and it comes with plenty of features so you can do with your music and iTunes libraries what you didn’t even know you could do.

Home Alone

Let me tackle the home problem first. Many households are multi-racial these days and have both Macs and PCs, often with iTunes libraries running on both machines.

That’s fine if everyone has their own individual iTunes library. Apple lets you run the same account through up to five machines, Mac or PC. But how do you keep iTunes in full sync between the machines.

Mac and Windows users have a few utilities that do just that. My preference is SuperSync, because it runs on both Mac and Windows, and makes synchronization happen with a click or two. It’s actually fun, and there are added features that make it more than worth the price of admission.

Harmony Problems

Here’s the problem. You have an iTunes account and an iTunes library of songs, movies, podcasts (or, multiple iTunes libraries). You have a Mac, and a PC, and multiple iPods. You have music scattered across all devices. You have a home network. How do you keep iTunes happy on all those devices (which makes for a good back up system)?

While Macs and PCs talk well to each other, you still have to know how to make the conversation happen. SuperSync does it automagically, connecting to, say, a PC elsewhere on your home network.

SuperSync loads your iTunes libraries from each computer so you can see what is on both, what is only on one or the other. At this point, it gets easy on the road to very complex.

Sync Me Baby, One More Time

SuperSync’s interface is straightforward and doesn’t require a Sync for Dummies book. It’s easy to browse all the iTunes media on either machine, Mac or PC. Music, artists, albums, and playlists are a click away.

Connecting to the Windows PC is simply a menu selection. SuperSync does all the handshaking and handholding to make it happen. When it does, it pulls in whatever is on your PC’s iTunes.

Here you can look at both Mac and PC iTunes libraries at the same time. Color codes identify the machines. Gray is your local machine. Blue tracks are on the remote machine. Green tracks are in both libraries on both machines.

Syncing is a click away. Select, for example, music (blue) on your Windows PC, then click the Synchronize button. The music tracks are copied to your local Mac. Ratings and play counts are also copied to iTunes on the local machine.

Visual cues help to tell you what’s going on. The music gets copied and the tracks turn green to show you that the media is on both Mac and PC. Easy, huh?

Wait. There’s much more. Click Here for Page 2 to see how SuperSync handles other media, your iPod, and moves and plays music across the internet.