It was all very easy when you had one iPod and one computer. But what do you do when you have an iPhone, 4 iPods, and three computers in the same household? Can you sync multiple computers to one iPod or vice versa?

There are various third-party applications to allow an iPod to sync with two different computers or to sink the library of two different computers together, but I’m going to talk about how to do it the Apple way…

If you have one computer, you can synchronise any number of iPhone’s or iPods to that computer. Just plug them in and when prompted say yes, I’d like to sync this ipod to this computer. If you select your iPod in iTunes, and select the Music tab, and then under settings select the “Entire music library” option, all the songs on your computer will be available on all your iPod or iPhones. Also, any songs that you purchase from iTunes on your iPhone will be synced back to your computer, and then passed on to the other iPod or iPhones. If for some reason this does not work, if you control click (left button click) on your iPhone in iTunes and then you will find a special menu item to manually transfer the purchased items across.

In other words syncing between multiple iPods and iPhones to a single computer works really well.

Going from one iPod/iPhone to multiple computers is more of a problem. If you have the “Entire music library” sync option checked, you can only sync your iPod or iPhone to one computer. This seems to be Apple’s way of stopping you pirating songs from one computer to another one.

So the Apple way of doing things is to choose which computer each iPhone or iPod will be synced with and just sync it to that one computer.

If you have two computers in your house, and you want to share your music between them, you simply have to go to your iTunes preferences and turn on library sharing as follows (this is with Snow Leopard) :

This will share all the music from one computer to any other computers on the same network – but both computers need to be turned on WITH ITUNES OPEN! This can be a bit of a downer if one computer is happens to be out in your study and it is your main one, so Apple have an option for you to transfer purchases from one computer to the other.

On your second computer, go into iTunes, turn on sharing, and your iTunes library should appear on your second computer like this:

There will be now two new buttons on the bottom right hand side of your iTunes library that control the copying of songs from your first computer to your second computer. The buttons look like this:

You can manually import songs by selecting the song and clicking on import, or you can automatically import purchased songs by clicking the settings button and selecting them:

Once you have this syncing working, you don’t need to have your first computer on to access the songs that were purchased on it. Of course you will have to make a decision as to whether you want all the songs from your first computer transferred across to your second one and taking up valuable hard drive space, or whether you want to manually transfer just some of the songs across.

SUMMARY: You can sync multiple iPods and iPhones to one computer and all the purchased songs will transfer across automatically. You can share libraries between different Macintosh computers. What you can’t do is synchronise one iPod or iPhone to different computers. If you don’t have snow leopard, you can do everything mentioned above except for the sinking of iTunes purchases between computers. The import and settings button were only added to iTunes in snow leopard.

1. Open iTunes.
2. Go to the ‘store’ page.
3. If you are signed in, sign out of itunes store (Click sign out on the menu above the top right of the iTunes store window in iTunes)
4. Select the country.
5. Go to app store.
6. Buy any FREE ipod application.
7. Click on create new account.
8. Under payment method select none as follows:

That’s it.
You can continue the signup process and you will have an account without a Credit Card linked to it.

SUMMARY:To get an iTunes account without a credit card you need to be logged out on my tunes, purchase a free iPhone app, and select none under payment options.

With Snow Leopard Apple have made the pause button on the remote control ALWAYS start and stop itunes. This means if you are watching TV on your mac, and you go to pause it, iTunes starts playing! There is no way to disable this.

The best workaround it to open itunes, and go to the itunes store. From here the play function will not work. You can then minimise itunes and watch TV!

Apple had just released itunes plus which has two main benefits, both are great.

1. All the songs are now going to be DRM free, so you can play them with different software and players.

2. The bitrate has now doubled so that the music is better quality. (I suggested the itunes bitrate was too low here, and how to get round it, but now apple have ‘fixed’ it for downloaded songs.) 

There is a great feature on the itunes store home page that will automatically (for a fee) upgrade all your songs!

To find  it you go to ‘quick links’ on the right, and click on ‘Upgrade my Library’.

It will give you the option of deleting your old library or moving it to the desktop.  I suggest you keep it, because if you ever need the lower quality 128 kbps songs (eg to listen to on your ipod), the original downloaded ones will be better quality than if you re-compress the new 256kbps down to 128.

Thankfully I have only purchased 20 songs from itunes, so the fee was just $10.

Importing songs into itunes is easy – you just INSERT the CD, SELECT it in iTunes, and CLICK on the menu item at the top of the screen that says ‘advanced’ – ‘convert selection to MP3′ Easy!

But… the default setting on iTunes is not the best setting to use when importing songs. In fact, there is a better way to import songs that uses a higher bitrate and even a better way that uses a program called LAME. This article describes how to import songs into iTunes with better quality .

NOTE: Since I wrote this article Apple have changed their policy and now use 256kbps on the iTunes store which is an incredible and immense improvement. This backs up what I have said in this article. The difference between Apple’s upgrade of 128kbps and 256kbps is very noticeable and it is worth upgrading your iTunes songs.

If you want to skip the technical stuff and go straight to having good music, jump down to the ‘How to do it’ section.

Introduction
If you go to iTunes:preferences and click on the advanced then importing tab you will see some options like Import Using: and Setting: This raises a few questions.

1. Why does Apple allow me to use different formats like AAC and MP3? Which one is better?

2. There are different ‘bit rates’. If a smaller bit rate uses less space, but has worse quality, and a higher one means better quality, how high do I have to go to get the best quality? How good is the default setting of 128 high quality (See picture below – click to enlarge).

Unfortunately I assumed the defaults were the best, so I used the built in defaults in iTunes to import my CD collection. But if you listen carefully to your iPod through your stereo, and compare it to a CD you will hear that at 128kbps there is a significant difference in audio quality.

It’s not that listening at 128kbps sounds bad, but if you compare it to the original, you will notice that it’s different.

The bottom line is if you want the best quality you need to use a much higher bitrate than 128kbps. I suggest either use the built in AAC encoder at 320kbps, or use a little program called the ‘LAME encoder’ on the ‘insane’ setting. I have re-imported all my CD collection using the LAME encoder set to the insane setting, and it sounds much better – I now cannot tell the difference between the compressed files or the originals.

What is LAME? What is insane?

Lame is an mp3 encoder that is open source, which means rather than being developed commercially, it was developed by unpaid enthusiast programmers. It was originally not as good as the commercial mp3 algorithm, but as many people worked on LAME, it actually overtook the original mp3 encoder and is now better, and free!

There are literally hundreds of possible settings to use with lame, regarding audio quality, there are lots of different ways LAME can encode. There are some standard settings, called standard (as good as the itunes defaults) extreme (better that itunes default) and insane (best possible quality).

OPTION 1: How to do it using iTunes

1. Open iTunes, on the iTunes menu select Preferences. Then on the general tab select Import Settings.

2. On the settings window select ‘AAC Encoder’ and ‘Custom’ as follows:

3. Select 320kbps. Sample rate can be auto or 44.1 VBR doesn’t matter really. The file may be smaller if you use VBR.

Click OK and import a CD as usual.

OPTION 2: How to do it using LAME

STEP 1. Download the itunes LAME Encoder.

Download the itunes-LAME Encoder from here (click on itunes LAME importer – download) and unzip it.

Download the Import with LAME script from here and unzip it.

Download the little iTunes LAME installer folder here and unzip it. This is a magic  folder and anything dragged onto it will automatically be installed into the itunes script library.

You should have three files looking like this:

STEP 2. Install the itunes LAME Encoder.

Drag the itunes-LAME icon (left fiel above) onto the |||Drag here to install||| icon.

Drag the iTunes-LAME script icon onto the |||Drag here to install||| icon.

In itunes there should me a new menu item between window and help.

Step 3. Import a CD.

Open itunes and insert a CD into your computer. Make sure the CD is selected in itunes.

Select the new itunes menu item Import with LAME…

A new iTunes-LAME window will appear that looks like this:

In the window type in –alt-preset insane as you can see above. Select prefs and select ‘cache tracks to hard drive’ also in prefs make sure destination is set to iTunes Music Library.
Click import, you will have a great quality CD in itunes, in a playlist called imported from LAME. You can delete this playlist, it is only so that you can see what you just imported.

Why trust me?

I am an Electrical Engineer, I worked at ABC radio in audio electrical engineering, I have been playing with audio gear and electronics gear for over 20 years.

Apart from copying your CD into itunes with no compression (apple lossless encoder) which takes 650MB per CD, this is the best quality you will get in itunes.

If you are low on space you are better off deleting some less favourite CD’s than encoding at a lower quality!

These are the settings I use for good quality speech in itunes:

Stereo Bit rate: 80kbbps

Sample rate: 22.050kHz

Channels: Mono

NOTE: This results in a 40kbps file (the mono file ends up at half the stereo bitrate)
A 20 minute talk will be about 6Mb and sound good.

If I am ripping from CD for speech for my ipod, say a story, and size is not so important, I set itunes to:

96kbps,
44.1kHz,
mono.

Which gives an output of 48kbps.The place you put these preferences in is itunes:preferences and click on the advanced icon then importing tab then Setting:Custom you can set the various options according to what you want.

Click here to read how to make the filesize (and quality) lower using LAME.

As soon as you plug your ipod shuffle into your mac for the first time, itunes will automatically open, and you will get a message that itunes has found your ipod, and what name do you want to give your ipod.

If this does not happen make sure you have itunes 7 installed.

The new iTunes looks fantastic & has some great new features.
However any quick survey of forum discussions will show you that there are some bugs that people are discovering.

For me (imac G5 10.4.7) i installed it only to find that no songs would play!
its clearly a common problem which is easily fixed.

Its simply a matter of checking your plug ins… (~ / Library / iTunes / iTunes plug ins).
For me and lots of others the offending plug in was OSS 3D. But there could be others. Delete the plug in & iTunes 7 works great!

A podcast is simply a small file called an ‘RSS feed’ that points to the audio (mp3) file that you want to podcast. This little ‘RSS feed’ file is then registered with a podcast site, like the apple itunes podcast site.

How it works
When someone clicks on the podcast icon in itunes, it takes them to the apple itunes podcast site, where they can search for the podcast they want. The apple site then points their itunes software to the little RSS file, which then points their itunes to the mp3 file that contains the audio. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a series of little signposts that eventually point to the mp3 file.

So as you can see, we need to put the mp3 file up, then create an RSS feed that points to the mp3 file, and then we register this RSS feed with itunes. We can then access the podcast from itunes.

So really the audio file alone is not the podcast, the rss file is not the podcast, the itunes store is not the podcast. The podcast is really the whole set of signposts.
The advantage of a podcast is that all the audio files are easy to find because they are centralised into the itunes store, and the process of downloading them once you are subscribed is automatic.

Let’s look at how to do it step by step.

1. Put up the mp3 file

The first set is to make an mp3 file (eg via ‘itunes’) and then place it on the internet somewhere using an ftp program (‘cyberduck’ is a good ftp program). You will need an account on a webserver to do this. This is dealt with elsewhere on ‘How to put a file on the internet’). The file will be called something like ‘talk1.mp3′ and it will be at a location somethign like ‘http://mywebsite.com.au/talks/talk1.mp3′. For our example we used the real file called ’20060212.mp3′ which we put on the web at at http://sermons.dpc.org.au/1john/20060212.mp3

2. Make an RSS file that points to the mp3 file

Now we need to make an RSS file that will point the the mp3 file to tell the podcast directory (in this case, the apple itunes podcast directory) where to find the mp3 file. There are hundreds of programs to make an RSS feed (eg ‘feedforall’) , but it’s hard finding a free one! Vodcaster looks good but it’s only for tiger. One good free one is at http://www.phelios.net/rss-writer.html it’s easy to use. The program will ask for information like the name of the mp3 file, artist, title of webcast etc, and it will put all this information into a file called an RSS file, which it will save to your hard drive. The program will give the file an extension of .xml So we called ours dpc and it was saved as ‘dpc.xml’

3. Put the RSS file somewhere on the web

It doesn’t matter where. We uploaded ours to http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml

4. Register the podcast with itunes

The last step is to let itunes know where the rss file is kept. Open up itunes, and click on the ‘podcasts’ icon. Down the bottom click on ‘podcasts directory’. This will take you to apple’s podcast page on the itunes music store. There is a link called ‘Submit a Podcast’ which you can click on. It will ask you for the podcast feed url. This is the address of the rss fiel you just created. (Eg http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml) Paste the address and click continue. Unfortunately you need to then enter your apple ID, you’ll need to register with apple to get one, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s not a .mac membership, just an apple id. Apple will send an email telling you when the podcast has been approved. It may take an hour or two.

5. Subscribe to the podcast

You should now be able to find your podcast on the ituens webpage. Go to itunes, podcasts, podcasts directory. There is a box to search for a podcast. Type in part of the name of your podcast (eg I might type in ‘Dubbo’) and click ‘search all podcasts’. It will display all the matches, in our case, 1 match – ‘DPC BibleTalks’. Click on subscribe to subscribe ot the podcast. You are now subscribed to the podcast!

6. Link to the podcast

Now the final step is to link to your new podcast from a webpage. Open itunes podcasts and next to your subscibed podcast title is a little right arrow. Click on this and it wil take you to the itunes homepage for your podcast.

If you right click on the podcast entry down the bottom, there is an option called ‘Copy itunes Music Store URL’. Click this and then it will copy the URL to the clipboard. You can then paste this into your homepage or email it to your friends. Ours was http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=121967957&s=143460&i=2214949

If you click on this it will open itunes and take you to our newly created podcast!