Dear Apple: iTunes Library Sync

I’m sitting here pondering why I drank so much on the eve of New Year’s Eve. What better way to pass the time while the aspirin kicks in than manually syncing my iTunes libraries?

Um, no. You know, if there’s one thing I wish iTunes had it’s the ability to sync the libraries across multiple computers. I have four machines I do work from, all of which have iTunes on them. There’s my home PC, a custom-built machine running Windows XP. There’s my work PC, a Dell running Windows Server 2003. There’s my work Mac, a dual G4 running 10.4, and then there’s my laptop, a Dell running Windows XP. Apple already lets me authorize all of them for playback of my stuff, so why not carry it a little further and keep the libraries in sync for me? Not just one way, either, but multiple-master. That way when I buy a song at work it’ll just magically appear on my laptop, and then my home machine. When I rip a CD at home it’ll migrate to my other libraries.

It should also sync the metadata, too, so when I’m bored sitting in an airport and I rate all of my songs, those ratings appear in all the libraries later. Ditto for the last play times and play counts, including synchronization with my iPods, so that if I play Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” 485 times on my drive to Minneapolis all of my libraries will know that and increment themselves. If I create a playlist on one machine, have it appear on the others, too. I don’t even care if the RIAA-mentality one-way iPod file sync is still around, just go both ways with the metadata. If there is a conflict between devices let me establish priorities, so my ratings on my iPod win over the ratings on my work PC.

In short, if I have authorized iTunes using valid credentials all of my iTunes instances and iPods should act as one, maintaining copies of the data on discrete PCs for backup and mobility purposes.

I could rsync the libraries together. I could sync them all to my main Linux box running Samba and then sync each off of there. All of that would require a significant effort to ensure that the music files and the metadata stayed in sync, and that I had a record in the library for each file. I’d have to reimport everything, though, which trashes my custom playlists. I could rewrite the iTunes Music Library.xml file but I’d have to reimport it again. That’s what syncOtunes does, but only between two libraries, and a reimport isn’t seamless. I could get the libraries all in sync on one machine and then copy everything, including the iTunes Library.itl file, to the other machines, but then I don’t have multiple-master capabilities anymore. I want seamless, Apple magic, the kind of “holy crap it just did the right thing” sort of feature Apple is famous for.

Apple, I know this is a doozy of a request, but please save me from library management hell!