TuneRanger Syncs Your iPod With Multiple Computers
I’ve always found the iPod a pain when I’ve wanted to update it with some songs at work, out of the box there’s simply no way to synchronise it with iTunes installed on my windows workstation and maintain my sync with iTunes on my Mac at home.
So, naturally, when I saw a promotion for TuneRanger hit my inbox I had to give it a Gadgetoid once over.
First and foremost I had to format my iPod to fat32 in order for my workstation to even recognise it. I did this at home by booting Windows XP under Parallels, formatting my iPod within iTunes when prompted and then restoring my music to it from within OSX. This process, at least, was painless.
Getting TuneRanger to behave itself in Windows was a different story, however. I managed to copy across my entire library to my workstation after downloading and installing both iTunes and TuneRanger. This, in itself, is a big win as I had no other reasonable way of moving my music..
However; after updating my workstation iTunes library with some additional tracks I was unable to get TuneRanger to perform a synchronize operation to get them onto my iPod. Instead it would just generate an obscure error and utterly refuse to function.
I raised a help response with Acertant and had actually recieved a response the next day; unfortunately it was eaten by my spam filter so I’ve sat upon TuneRanger for a few months wondering if I’ll ever get it to work.
Now, months later I’ve finally turned my attention back to pushing out a somewhat late review of TuneRanger and got in touch with Acertant regarding my perceived tardiness of their support services. They replied a copy of the original support response sent out in early March! The resolution is simple; Auto Update mode must be turned off in iTunes to prevent both iTunes and TuneRanger from manipulating the iPod simultaneously and TuneRanger failing to synchronize. I’ll try this as soon as I get hold my iPod USB cable and post an update below! The “Just Works” Apple mentality must be addling my brain.
For $20 – $30 the price ($20 if you get a discount offer by email from Smith Micro) TuneRanger includes an impressive array of sync functionality which even works over a network, it also includes a whole 5 single platform licenses which should be more than enough to keep your iPod synchronised to an array of computers at home and whilst away.