How can I get my iPod to play nice with my PowerBook and my XP box?
It sounds like you want iTunes on both your XP machine and your Powerbook, and for both of them to have the same library. While this could work, have you thought about not even using iTunes on your XP machine? You could just treat your XP machine as an external hard drive, and manage your music from the Powerbook exclusively. The following method might work with two iTunes libraries, but you’d have a hell of a time keeping them in sync. In the Finder, choose Go > Connect To Server (Cmd-K.) This will bring up a window that asks for a server name. Click Browse at the bottom. This should open a Finder window from which you can select Network > Workgroup > (etc until you find your shared folder on your XP box.) You might have to enter your Windows username and password to connect to your XP box (in fact, I’d be worried if you didn’t,) but it should work. Now, in iTunes, you can set this folder as your iTunes music folder. Use iTunes as usual. Just make sure you’re connected to your XP mach
If you want to use the auto-synch feature of iTunes where it’ll duplicate your entire music library to the iPod, you’ll have problems. If both computers have this setting on, one collection will wipe off the other on the iPod. Although it’s more of a pain, if you want to regularly copy some music from either computer to the iPod, then turn off automatic synching and use the manual mode. Then you select what you want on the iPod and can add from whatever source you want. If you’re trying to limit down how you access things, go with one of the suggestions upthread. That appending versus replacing/editing comments thing is weird. You should be able to change everything about a file, regardless of platform. I’ve noticed some weirdness in iTunes 5 so I wonder if they’ve done something sneaky to limit down what you do outside of the “source” library. I’ll post back to the thread if I find anything out.
update to the update. After making changes to the years on the XP box and syncing to the iPod, I switched to manual mode again and tried to append comments via OSX. When I resynced back to the XP machine, the comments disappeared. I have no idea what to expect anymore, so I’m just muddling by with Dumb Playlists.
1 – You can edit comments, rate & rank, create playlists as much as you want on the machine that isn’t the iPod’s “home” – you just can’t (with iTunes) get the music back off of it 2 – See #1, it’s not so much creating then putting, but creating on the iPod. 3 – Yes, just drop the MP3’s from your XP box onto your iPod, when you next plug your iPod into your PB they’ll appear in your iPod. Remember your iPod’s HDD is a seperate entity from either your XP’s or PB’s HDD. If you want to kick it to the curb, then that’s another matter…
