Bidirectional Synching
Will xPlay do this? EphPod will, not, as far as I can see, do this. If not xPlay, then what?
[510 byte] By [graystrickland] at [2007-11-9 12:19:17] 
I use my iPod with my home and office computers. I rip tunes at both locations, so I need a way to synch which is fully automatically bidirectional. By this I mean that when I drop it in the cradle at work, it will see any tunes on the pod which are not on my work pc and put them there as well as see any tunes on the work pc which are not on the iPod and put them there. And do the same when I return home.
Will xPlay do this? EphPod will, not, as far as I can see, do this. If not xPlay, then what?
# 1 Re: Bidirectional Synching
Do you want the xPlay to look at the contents of the iPod, compare it to the harddrive, and copy and songs that are missing to the harddrive? I believe that Apple, in the interest of DRM didn't want us to have the ability to copy music from the iPod to the harddrive. Ephpod will do it, but not automatically, xPlay has never done it. Both xPlay and ephPod sync to the iPod folder that it is connected, so it would delete the music not on the harddrive.I don't believe there is any way to do what you want to do.
Bill McNair
SouthsideIrish at 2007-11-15 17:22:38 >
# 2 Re: Bidirectional Synching
Originally posted by SouthsideIrish Do you want the xPlay to look at the contents of the iPod, compare it to the harddrive, and copy and songs that are missing to the harddrive?
Yes.
I understand and respect copyrights. I don't download music except on Rhapsody, where I pay for it. The rest is music I have ripped from my own cd collection, which I just want to be accessible at home and office. I fail to see how bidirectional synching would promote piracy.
graystrickland at 2007-11-15 17:23:37 >
# 3 Re: Bidirectional Synching
it's not that bidirectional sync'ing promotes piracy. its that apple gives the aura off that they think bidirectional sync'ing *could* promote piracy......and anyone that doesn't agree with them usually gets to defend their beliefs in court. What a loving company...(I sold my stock ages ago). I'd say post it as a feature request thingy over at media4's web forumse. you can copy music to your hard drive with xplay manually so I'm sure they'd consider bi-directional sync'ing.
I don't know of any other way to do this though. nobody's written any software that'll do it that I've ever heard of...yet...
AMG at 2007-11-15 17:24:36 >
# 4 Re: Bidirectional Synching
I did post a message at Xplay's site and got back "no, it would promote piracy..." Oh well, I guess what I wish is that synching an iPod worked more like synching a Palm Pilot. I wish that you'd drop it in the cradle and, voila, be presented with a list of what's new (including new tags) on each side so that you can easily click to select/unselect what's going to go back and forth. The default would be to put everything that's on the Pod on the PC and vice versa, but you ought to be able to override -- including permanent overrides. For example, if my wife puts Enya on the home pc so it gets on the Pod and I hate Enya, I don't want to have Enya synch up to my office pc and take up space there.
graystrickland at 2007-11-15 17:25:41 >
# 5 Re: Bidirectional Synching
did the xplay people say that?I totally understand what you're going for with the palm-like syncing. I don't know of any software that does this though...yet...
AMG at 2007-11-15 17:26:42 >
# 6 Re: Bidirectional Synching
I posted a message in Xplay's (Mediafour's) forum. The responses I received are from users, not the manufacturer, but the basic message was NO.in order to thwart piracy, you can only sync to one machine unless you want to delete all of your ipod music. your music wil have to exist on one machine or else you will have to manually add music.
How does that thwart piracy?
it doesnt really, but the inherent idea is that you cannot steal copywrite music from a friends machiene so that only one library can be set as the home computer. It syncs your data so if the data is different on another machiene, it deletes the stuff not present on that machiene from the ipod.
graystrickland at 2007-11-15 17:27:41 >
[an error occurred while processing this directive]