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Sharing iTunes with iPod

rwsimon

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When I get my iPad, how will I share iTunes with it and my iPod Touch? The iPad will have a much greater capacity which I plan to use for additional videos and such. How will synching with iTunes work in this case? Clearly, there will be many things that I want to go to the iPad that I don't want to go to the iPod. Perhaps people who currently have both iPods and iPhones know the answer to my question. Is there already a strategy in place for this?
 

gentlefury

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When I get my iPad, how will I share iTunes with it and my iPod Touch? The iPad will have a much greater capacity which I plan to use for additional videos and such. How will synching with iTunes work in this case? Clearly, there will be many things that I want to go to the iPad that I don't want to go to the iPod. Perhaps people who currently have both iPods and iPhones know the answer to my question. Is there already a strategy in place for this?

Same as having multiple iPod Touches...not sure if there will be a migration tool.
 

codyhinson

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you will have a ipad section just like the iphone or ipod you click the ipad in the menu it will show you the disk space available and have the tabs where you can choose what to sink and what not to its just like what happens when you sync ipod or iphone its just as simple. try synching your ipod today and notice in tunes the setup it gives you this will be the same for the ipad when you unplug it will disappear like the iphone and ipod touch.
 

rob the elder

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Actually, I did not find enough information in your question to give a complete answer. Instead let me explain some of my personal lessons learned and see if any of this helps.

ITUNES is an application that runs on a primary host. The hose can be a Win box as in my case or any Apple OS computer.

The ITUNES host imports data in the form of music, movies, videos, pictures, etc. The catagories listed in ITUNES which you can find on the ITUNES website.

When ITUNES imports data, it adds the fact of the data to its library. The lilbrary is a listing of the information about the data, song title, album, cover are etc. The library exists on the ITUNES host computer in the ITUNES folder.

When ITUNES imports data, it actually saves off the data to any location that the user establishes in the ITUNES preferences. The default is on the host hard drive in the ITUNES music folder, but you can point ITUNES at any hard drive on the network accessible by the ITUNES host. For example, I used to host the library and the data on my ITUNES host, a purpose built XP box, but the library rapidly out grew my host disk size and is now resident on an external server. A consideration is the size of your library and the cost in labor hours and dollars of replacing the ITUNES data. If you loose the data then you are out of luck. ITUNES will ONLY allow you to download the data ONCE and if you loose it you are out of luck. You can back it up to CD or DVD if you have a burner but once you reach a certain size it can take for ever to back up. Right now my library is 3+ TB and it takes most of a month to manually burn DVDs to back it up. Thus I have two servers for my library data.

Once you have ITUNES hosted on a PC, that PC can share music, videos etc with up to 5 authorized machines. this means the host plus 4 other computers. There is no limit to the number of IPODs that can be associated with an ITUNES host, but you can ONLY share with 4 other PCs. Believe me I learned this lesson the hard way. I maintain all my movies and music in duplicate files so I can share them with unlimited computers via WMP but only 4 other PCs are associated with my ITUNES host.

When you plug an IPOD into an ITUNES host for the first time ITUNES "remembers" that IPOD uniquely. You need to name that IPOD with a unique name - Rob's Red IPOD - for example. Then every time you plug that IPOD into that ITUNES host, Rob's Red IPOD will pop up and you can sync it.

The first time you plug in that IPOD, you set up syncing for automatic or manual. If automatic, then ITUNES will randomly select from your available music a set of tunes and load them onto your IPOD till its filled up. If you set it for manual, you can then drag individual tunes into your IPOD (or video) or you can drag whole playlists into the IPOD and they will be synced.

If the combination of playlists and video's is larger than the IPOD capacity then ITUNES will give you an error message and you can either shrink the size of the playlist or select less video content to load on the IPOD. Once the list of items to be added is at or less than the capacity of the IPOD ITUNES will execute the sync and you are good to go.

If the IPAD is treated like an IPOD, then you can sync it in a manner similar to syncing an IPOD.

If the IPAD is treated as a computer rather than as an IPOD, then you need to have an instance of ITUNES running on the IPAD and you can share with the ITUNES primary host. This means you can play any music, videos etc on the ITUNES host if you car connected or you can drag copies into the IPAD resident ITUNES instance and they will play as long at that IPAD ITUNES instance is one of the 4 "authorized" on your ITUNES account.

Or you can treat the IPAD as its own host for ITUNES and set up a separate account with ITUNES. But then you can not share purchased or DRM protected files between the two ITUNES accounts.

Alternatively, you can do what I do and that is save off your music and non ITUNES purchased items into a separate file, I use WMP, winamp or other tools to import CDs and DVDs and save them off in MPEG4 or .WAV files. You can separately import these data files into the second instances of ITUNES and they will run just fine.

I would NOT recommend making any portable device your primary host for ITUNES purchased data. It will get broken or lost or . .. murphy's law says you will loose it when it hurts the most.

Hope this helps
 

Dorje

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It is most likely that the iPad will operate the same way as an iPod/iPhone for syncing, considering they share an OS (the iPhoneOS). When you plug in the iPad there will likely be the same two options, Sync or Manually Manage. See the two KB links below.

Using iPod with multiple computers
Managing content manually on iPod and iPhone

For the iPad I would expect a new Tab for Documents and/or iBooks is my guess.

In the case of syncing an iPod and iPad to the same machine anything you buy in the iPad will transfer to your iTunes (on your PC) if the App can run on an iPod Touch then you should be able to add it to your iPod.

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If on the off chane the iPad functions like a full iTunes program then you would only need to autorize it like you would a 2nd PC (to your max of 5 at one time.) Apple has been working on sycing libraries between PC, and if the iPad works like this (which I don't think) the I would expect to see an easy guided process for setting up that sync, again likely outwardly the same way it is handled for the iPod at the UI level.
 

rob the elder

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Good points. I dont have any experience with purchasing from ITUNES Store with other than a PC running ITUNES. I have not purchased via Apple TV because I have 4 of them and its just easier to purchase from the host.
 

Dorje

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I generally buy directly from my Mac's iTunes (same as PC) especially music/audio. However I tend to download an increasing number if podcasts and a few minor apps. Those items get copied over when I sync and get put into my Mac/PC's library file.

What I do not know is how application data gets sync. Say you have something like 2Do (which is to do list app) and sync it across multiple devices that you own. I do not know if one will overwrite the other or if they will remain standalone.
 

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