How To Sync Your iTunes Music On Multiple Macs

Friday, March 27, 2009 | Tips and Tricks | Read or Post a Comment

iTunes Almost every Mac user that I know has more than one Mac in their household. My husband and I are no exception. MacPro. iMac. MacBook. Mac mini.

Keeping email, contacts, and calendar events synchronized between multiple Macs is handled rather easily with MobileMe. Keeping our iPhones and iPods in sync with what’s stored on our Macs or PCs is just a click away.

What about synchronizing iTunes music and your photos in iPhoto? It’s easy and not so easy.

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5 Reader Comments

Jake said:

I’ve been using the beta of Echodio to sync iTunes libraries between home and web and so far it’s showing a lot of promise. It also backups your music collection to S3. The only downside is that the beta doesn’t sync multiple playlists, you have to drag the tracks you want to sync into the Echodio playlist for it to work.

Adam said:

Since the only laptop in my house is my wife’s Dell running Ubuntu, I’ve taken to having a dedicated drive on my server (800Mhz Quicksilver 2002 running leopard) for iTunes, one for Photos, and one for misc files. Then I just point the iTunes library preference to that network drive on any other Mac I happen to have up and running. It’s works OK for what I need it for, and if I happen to want to watch/listen to something from that drive from the laptop, all I have to do is connect to the share (assuming I didn’t buy it from iTunes). All that will be going away soon anyway, as all my Macs are getting sold off to fund the Mac Pro that should be arriving on my doorstep in the next couple days.

Aaron Pressman said:

I like syncopation just fine but even it has choked with Apple’s poorly thought out iTunes Plus upgrade program. The only way I have figured out to get my DRM-free, upgraded tracks from my MBP to my iMac (both are “authorized computers” on my iTunes store account), is to upgrade on one, pray that iTunes correctly deletes old tracks and moves metadata, fix all the non-deletion, non-metadata transfers, go to the second computer DELETE all the tracks I just updated and THEN run Syncopation. Nightmare in more detail on my blog: “The Messy, The Missing, The Mistakes” http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=726

Carl Jr. said:

Outside of SuperDuper!, Chrono Sync, and Time Machine, I have yet to find a good sync product, especially for iTunes and iPhoto files. iPhoto is a package these days, and that makes it especially difficult to keep in sync between Macs.

Ms. Bambi is probably right that your best bet is to avoid back and forth synchronization and stick with backing up to other Macs but keeping one Mac as the master.

That works best for me.

Jeff said:

I saw an article on this the other day and got the demo, but it doesn’t sync Album Art! I’m on a neverending quest to get all my album art in there so I’ll still use it but as a master/non-master kind of situation.

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