Feaverish

This is something I’ve been trying to do for years, but only recently figured out. The short version is, if you want to keep your iPod synced with your home computer but listen to it through iTunes on your work computer (or any other computer), it’s possible. Just set your iPod to sync automatically at home, and when you get to work and plug it in, set it to sync manually. When you get back home, set it to automatic sync again. There are several caveats, but I’ll let you read those and more detailed instructions after the jump.

For some reason Apple won’t let you play your iPod through iTunes if your iPod is set to automatically sync. You can browse the iPod’s library and playlists and everything, but the songs are grayed-out and unplayable.

If you’ve read this website at all, you know that I’m a little anal about my music. I totally geek out on play counts and last.fm stats. In the olden days, I used to take my iPod to work and just listen to it directly, using the tiny scroll wheel and tiny screen to find music I wanted to listen to. When I got home, I’d sync the iPod with last.fm using iScrobbler. All my play counts were preserved, and, if iScrobbler was working right, sent to last.fm.

There are some minor problems with this method, though. For one thing, iScrobbler erases any play data as soon as you play a song in iTunes. So, if L played a song while I was at work, or if I forgot to sync before I played a song, all that precious, precious data was lost. Also, playing music through your iPod is not nearly as nice as using iTunes. You can’t group music by Shift- or Command-clicking, the search is clunky or non-existant, you can’t use hot-key apps (I love SizzlingKeys) to switch between songs, etc.

I could just manage my iPod manually, but that wouldn’t sync play counts. I know there are scripts to do this kind of thing, but none that I’ve tried were very reliable).

So here’s how to keep your iPod synced at home, but still listen to it through iTunes on a different computer:

1) Sync your iPod with your home computer. It doesn’t matter if you sync the entire library or just certain playlists.

2) When you get to your work computer, plug in your iPod. If it’s the first time you’ve done so, you’ll get a dialog box telling you that your iPod is currently synced to another library, and giving you the option to sync it with your work library. Tell it no; you don’t want to sync it with your work library.

3) Click on your iPod in the source list. There’s a box on that page that says “Manually manage music and videos”. Check this box.

4) You’ll get a dialog asking you if you’re sure you want to manually manage music and videos, and warning you that you’ll need to manually eject your iPod. Click OK.

5) If you click on the little triangle next to your iPod (in the source list), you’ll see all your playlists and your iPod library. When you click on one of these playlists, you’ll get a warning saying that you’ve made changes to your iPod’ settings, and asking if you want to apply these changes. Click Apply. Update: I forgot that there’s an Apply button on the main iPod page in iTunes. It’s in the bottom right corner. Click it.

6) You’re done! Well, almost done. When you click on your iPod library or playlists now you’ll see that the songs are no longer grayed out. You can play them, search for them, and even rate them just like you would with songs in your iTunes library.

7) When you get back home, plug in your iPod. When you click on it in the source list, you’ll see that the “Manually manage…” box is still checked. Uncheck it. You’ll get a warning that all the songs on your iPod will be replaced by the songs in your iTunes library. Click OK. Like before, you’ll get a message asking if you want to apply the changes. Click the Apply button in the lower right corner to apply the change.

8) iTunes will now sync your library with your home computer. The warning in the previous step makes it sound like iTunes has to manually copy every song back onto the iPod, but that’s not how it actually works. It takes about 30 seconds to perform the sync on my 80GB iPod, and when it’s done, all the play count, star rating, and last-played info in iTunes has been updated.

The big limitation to this trick, though, is that as far as I can tell the only song data you can safely edit is the star rating. Your iPod will automatically change the play count and last-played data when you play a song, but you don’t want to manually edit any of the other song information or the edited song won’t sync. For instance, if you change the title of a song (even slightly, like, capitalizing a letter), all changes, ratings, play counts, and last-played data will be lost when you sync the iPod at home. The song who’s data you changed will simply be replaced by the original song in your iTunes library, with whatever rating, play count, and last-played data that original song had.

The same goes for manipulating playlists. If you add or remove a song to or from a playlist on your iPod, any changes you make to that song will be lost, and the song will be re-added/removed from that playlist when you sync. It’s not a deal-breaker for me, but it is annoying.