Carl Hutzler's Blog

I have written before about the trials and tribulations of using a media server (Network Attached Storage) with iTunes. The benefits are of course having your data centralized so any machine can get to it, along with the ability to have your music/video data stored on RAID drives and hopefully backed-up to another network machine (on or off-site via rsync). Those are the pluses.

1. The negatives are that each machine in the house has a link to the music and if the links get messed up or iTunes decides to store data using the default iTunes location (~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media) then you start to have music all over the place or links get broken and music will no longer play.

2. Plus if people buy music (or rip) on different machine in the house, then even though the music files (mp3 files) themselves are stored on the server, each iTunes library can get out of sync in terms of what music it “knows” about. This is because the library file on each machine only knows about what was added to that machine.

3. And lastly, each ipod/iphone in the house has this pain in the ass issue where it has to always be sync’d to the same machine. Otherwise it will dump all the music and other DRM based content (music, video, tv) and totally resync the ipod! What a pain when you are traveling and your daughter just wants to update her ipod with a few new songs she just bought on the iTunes library running on your laptop!

But I have found solutions to all of these. Yes, yes it is true. And I will now share them with you free of charge. :-)

Solution #1: iTunes 9.x will accept a new location for storing your music under ADVANCED PREFERENCES. Once set, this is the new location for all new music, video, tv, audio books, etc. Below is my location which is a network volume/share called “music” which containes the iTunes folder and “iTunes Media” folder. This is all you have to do.

But one issue in the past has been that iTunes will forget this location IF you ever open iTunes without the volume/share being mounted. In this situation, iTunes defaults back to the normal location ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media. And you would not even realize it and then all the new music you buy would be stored locally. And then you have this big pain of re-syncing everything. Well not a huge pain but a pain.

Well iTunes 9.x seems to have adjusted that behavior a bit. If you open iTunes 9.x without the share mounted it will still default back ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media and all new music you buy will be stored there. But the next time you open iTunes and that share is present, iTunes will point back to it as it originally did. So it has the best of both worlds – it will work if you run it on a laptop and the share is not there. But as soon as it finds the share again on the next launch, it will go back to the way you want it.

Solution #2: Syncopation

Syncopation is a $25 piece of software that will allow you to truly synchronize up to 5 machine’s iTunes libraries. So if you buy music on one machine it can sync it to the other machines in the house. Now I am not talking about the MP3 file as all machines in the house store the files on the server (NAS). What I am talking about is the library that contains a pointer to these files. If you buy on one machine, that link is only in the itunes libary on that machine – not the others. Syncopation will add the link (music) to the other machine’s iTunes Libraries for you. And if you configure the right preferences syncopation will not bother copying the music file either (it knows people store the music on a server in many cases!). Syncopation will also sync music playlists, ratings and other stuff. And it really works! Cheap and effective.

Solution #3: iPod/iPhone Syncing

iPods and iPhones sync music to a specific iTunes Library file to prevent (well at least make it not easy) people from steeling music. The key thing that I did not know before was that it is the iTunes Library file which is the thing it sync’s to…NOT THE COMPUTER! So if you create your iTunes library file on one machine and get it all happy the way you want, then copy that file to the other machines in the house, every machine will have the same iTunes Library file ## that each iPod looks for when it syncs. As long as that ## is the same (internal to each library file), you can sync your iPod to any library in the house without the dreaded “This iPod is sync’d to another library” message.

Kind of nice!