Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

Well my collection is 60GB, all tagged easily with mp3tag, so a 20GB collection is hardly a barrier... This way my music collection is perfect no matter which device I'm using it on (which is important when you go through half a dozen phones across several different OS a year, in addition to needing PS3 playback etc).

Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

You mean smart playlists? There's several media players that do that now. Songbird is one of them (though it looks like iTunes >.>)

But part of the appeal of iTunes is that it syncs the database with the iPod/iPod Touch/iPhone. So your play counts, ratings, etc.. sync with the main database, so the smart playlists become more accurate. There's yet really to be any software that does something similar in this regard.

Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

I know it's not true syncing, but do you know that you can do this:

Make an iTunes playlist with the songs that you want on your tablet. Connect your tablet via USB. Within iTunes, select that playlist then "Select All" to highlight all the songs in that playlist. Drag that selection into a folder on your tablet and wait (a long time) for the music to be copied. The directory structure of your music is maintained, which suits most Maemo music players.

Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

It's really restrictive. It only allows you to sync you library with one computer. When trying to a song from another computer in asks you "Are you sure you want to erase all songs on your iPod and start a new sync". Also who the **** came up with the idea that you are limited to transfer any songs on your iPod only with ONE app? Yes, Apple, Their stuff works nice and dandy unless you try to do something they don't want. Also iTunes is a piece of bloat, 200MB download and sometimes almost 100MB updates. This is almost as bad as Nokia PC suite.

Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

why not try zune. Maybe an app to mimic zune features and sync and it wouldnt be itunes. Plus the zune pass for 14.99 all u can download. This would be great in the usa. No comes with music here.

Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

If iTunes was perfect, we'd all be using it right now, knowing perfectly well how to properly use it.

iTunes only works very well if you use it the Apple way. a rant from 2008.

iTunes is also one-way sync. When I download an update for application on my iPod touch, iTunes on my Mac wants to download that very update again. Why is that? Waste of bandwidth.

Something based on rsync would easily do the job. Just, during sync you need to have the database on a journaling FS, and replace the one on USB & FAT32 only after the rsync is complete.

Re: Palm pre kind of iTunes sync possible?
 

Great, now we have some common meats to chew :D
(It's good to talk about the problems and try to come up with solutions than just talk about the problems as an excuse to vent).

Re: sync to more than 1 computer

This has been bugging me more so on my PIM data than media library. Can anyone point me to a simple implementation of 1 device to many hosts sync, that doesn't implement a common back end?

I had the impression that this is not such a straightforward issue to be implemented in automatic fashion.

In iPod\iTunes's case, you can disable auto-sync to manually manage your library with multiple machinse, right?

@allnameswereout: good points

about the one way sync, you're right. but they do have the option called 'transfer purchases' (or something like that) to move updates\purchases you've made on your touch back to your iTunes to avoid downloading it more than once.