Ever since I've had a Laptop with a decent size hard drive it made sense to keep my main music library on it, as it sees more use than the home PC and I like to sync / update my iPhone while I'm on the move incase I come across some new mixes worth downloading.
This presents one issue..
What about my 'at home' music selection?
- Do I let it go stale?
- Do I copy/paste everything from my laptop periodically? (No thanks)
- Do I use my laptop to listen to music at home? (not really very practical with kids running around the place)
After months of chin stroking and trying out different ideas I finally found the perfect solution (for me), maybe it can work for you too....
This clever little tool allows you to specify a pair of folders that should be synced. There are various flavors of sync, the one that I use is 'Echo'. This means that any changes in my laptop music collection are 'Echoed' over to my home PC. It works out what tracks have been changed/updated/added and ensures they are copied to the home PC.
When setting up the folder pair I had to share the folder in Vista (Win XP Method) that contains the music on my home PC and then map a drive (Win XP Method) to this on my laptop. Obviously syncing only works when I'm on my home network, but this is fine for me. If you wanted to sync from a remote location you could use something like Hamachi to create a virtual private network over the Internet. It might take a while to sync if you have a lot of changes though.
You must ensure that before you perform your sync you add *.itl and *.XML to the excluded file section. This stops synctoy from copying the iTunes library file over to the other PC.
See the figure below...
The name of this program speaks for itself - you point it at your music directory, it then automatically updates your iTunes library with any new / changed song files and track information.
Why is this necessary? iTunes has no 'refresh' option - if new files appear in your music directory they are not automatically added to the iTunes library until you play them. I have no idea why it was designed like this.
There are other more rudimentary ways of updating the library file, but this piece of software makes it an absolute breeze. My collection contains just over 3000 tracks and it took 20 minutes to update the library. Subsequent updates will be a lot quicker.
Well, that's pretty much it. If any part of each step seems a little vague, let me know.