Syncotunes

My partner and I live in a small cottage on the pacific coast on the South Island of New Zealand that these days is home and part-time workplace. The only problem is that we both had to leave our CD-collections at home in Europe, as travelling with 900 CD's is just a bit awkward and mailing them is rather expensive, so in a couple of days work we digitized our respective collections onto my G4 Ibook (obviously not EVERY song, but pretty much the best tracks of each album). The only problem is that the number of computers in our household has increased considerably with the introduction of a Windows gaming machine and a Mac mini moonlighting as a printserver and serving MP3's via our wifi-lan to the the Ibook and the Windows thingie.

Another worry is that most of the new music that we acquire is being downloaded to the Ibook (as this is the machine we use for our day to day life) and not to the Mac mini, while sometimes the minimac is being used to digitalise cds (the ibook's removable drive is broken), so we used to have two increasingly different Itunes libraries on our machines, and synchronizing them was rather tedious: rsync and cron-jobs are to tedious to program, Chronosync crashed repeatedly, doing it manually is just to tedious and you control:tunes too expensive.

Enter freeware proggie Syncotunes, a little Realbasic utility by Oligrob Software that is so easy to use that even a complete eejit like me can use it. After lauching it, you tell syncotunes where on your network the two differing itunes library xml files are, et voila: a couple of minutes later you have two crisp, synchronized folders. Easy as that.

The support from the author is superb, each enquiry I had was answered within hours. This is the first freeware program in a long time that I have been happy enough with to donate some of my hard earned cash via the Paypal donate-button, but this is just so bloody useful and well supported that I just couldn't live with my conscience weighing on me.