iTunes sync methods

Silverado8405 · Jun 26, 2013

After reading the apple documentation I set up 3 user accounts for my wife's and my iPhones and our sons iPod touch so we could each have our own libraries. While this works, it's a pain for me when I go to backup all the devices because I have to login/logout between devices.

I've been doing some searching and found an older article that states multiple users can have one "master" library and when set to sync selected songs, will recognize the individual devices and sync appropriately. Does anyone use this method and does it work well for you?

Link to the article I found.

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willerz2 · Jun 26, 2013

In terms of backups, I think you can just backed them all up without logging on/off your Apple IDs since it should be device specific. All backups should be saved separately in the default cache directory on your device. When you bring up a restore, iTunes should ask for the time/date of the backup that you want to restore from, and it should only show the backups and such for the device that's plugged in assuming all devices are authorized for use with the computer

Silverado8405 · Jun 27, 2013

It's the logging off of the different users on the computer, not the apple id that's getting me now. Though that does answer the question of how would backups work if we all used the same library.

I guess my biggest concern is me not getting the wife's/son's music on my phone. They say they have good taste on music but my ears and stomach tend to disagree with them. Maybe I'll make a test library and trial it on their devices before going live. They're easier to fix if something goes wrong as they don't have a couple thousand songs in their libraries.

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dbplumb · Jun 27, 2013

We have 5 doing that. All getting media from the same library.
All devices set to manually manage media.
Ensure iTunes does not automatically sync connected devices.
All backing up to same place.
Change I Ds for purchases and updates.
Share each others apps, or not.

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Silverado8405 · Jun 28, 2013

Not going to lie, I've gotten burned by the manually manage music before and had to redo all 300 some songs on my phone. Don't know why but several times it just decided to forget that my phone was associated with that library and all I did was plug in for my weekly backup. I'm not opposed to trying it as long as it plays nice this time around.

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Silverado8405 · Jul 7, 2013

After some playing around I think I've got something that works.

What I did was combine both my wife's and my libraries, deleting the duplicates in the process. Next I made a playlist for my songs and a playlist for my wife's plus her other playlists and then synced selected playlists/ringtones/movies.

The snag I then ran into was how to keep purchased music separate as I want nothing to do with my wife's music and vise versa. What I finally ended up doing was creating two smart playlists, one for each of us and setting the filters as follows:

My music filters: purchased is true, media is music, song is checked, rating is greater than 3. Now this means I have to rate all the songs that I buy but it also allows me to set a lower rating and hide some purchased songs.

My wife's filters: purchased is true, media is music, song is checked, rating is nothing. Since my wife wants all her music regardless this should work out well as long as I don't forget to rate my songs.

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