I’ve written three other entries on the subject of my iPod and coming up with a viable workflow to manage my music collection both at home and at work, and of course, on the iPod itself.
I offer this look simply as a way of saying “this is how I do it and it seems to work for me.” It’s by no means the only way to manage your music in more than one location and I’m sure it’s certainly not the most elegant way. But, it works for me.
I use a PC workstation at the office for graphics, video and animation work. Having a larger hard drive than my laptop (which is used mostly as an admin tool: email, calendar, IM, time sheets, etc.) the workstation became my holding area for my iTunes library. Over the course of several months I would bring in CDs from my home collection and rip them onto that system so they would be available for listening during the workday.
Once I purchased my 40gig iPod, I wondered how it would handle synchronizing with more than one machine and if that was even possible. It didn’t take long to figure out that the iPod only likes to be synched, or “associated”, with one system at a time.
For whatever reason, I decided that I would use my home PC as my “base” and synch the iPod there. The home PC is where I would shop the iTunes Music Store and purchase music. That part was easy. Plugging in the iPod for the first time, iTunes instantly recognized the new device and began loading it up with the contents of my home iTunes library.
Now… how to get those songs to the office?
I thought that I could simply use my iPod at the office as my music device. That certainly is the easiest option. But for several reasons I wanted to look for a way to get the iPod songs into my iTunes library at work. First, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of leaving my iPod sitting on my desk. I was worried that it might grow legs and walk away at some point when I ran to the coffee machine. Also, (and most importantly) there are a group of us here at work that share our iTunes libraries across the network. I wanted to get my songs on there too so I could participate in that community sharing. (Can’t you just feel the love?)
The answer? Shareware apps, of course!
What I needed was a way to easily extract songs from the iPod and place them into the iTunes library at work without having to jump through many hoops. After poking around at iPodLounge, I came across PodUtil, a very nice little tool that somewhat mimics the iTunes design and lets you to search and extract music files from the iPod onto your local system. A tool like this is needed since the music files are stored on the iPod’s drive in a very non linear way making it next to impossible (if not extremely time consuming) to pull files by hand.
Now, if I happen to rip a CD at work, I find those files in my local iTunes library and copy them to my iPod simply as files on the hard drive, not as songs in the iPod’s library. Then that night I take the iPod home, plug it into my home system, launch iTunes and use File > Add Folder to Library to import those new songs into my “master” iTunes library at home.
There is one other shareware app in my iTunes toolkit and that is a little thing called iOpener which allows me to share music the music in my iTunes library that was purchased via the iTunes Music Store without having to authorize my coworker’s computers with my personal iTunes account info. The process is, after using PodUtil to load any new music onto my work computer, I then run iOpener which searches through my entire library for any new music that has not been “opened”.
One note about iOpener: this little app comes with no guarantees at all and very little documentation and is by no means a fine example of rock solid software development. In fact, it crashes almost every time I use it. But, again, it does work for me, so until something better comes along…
Well, that’s it. That’s my little workflow for keeping my various collections of digital music in some kind of order. Hope it helps.
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