— UPDATE — Well Apple you have finally fixed this up for me with iTunes 9. Between the new Home Sharing feature that was widely talked about and the little tidbit of the “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder that was put in my automator actions are pretty much not needed. I may tweak them so it will copy new music to the “Auto Folder” from one mac to another.
I tested this out today and it works like a charm, happy day.
We have 2 Macs at home and 2 iPods, and a fairly large music collection. I like to maintain the same music collection on the 2 Macs, but sometimes I buy a song on my laptop, my wife rips a cd on the iMac and keeping the collections in sync is a pain. I figured out a way that works well for me to Automagically keep things in sync using Automator and iCal plugins. I created a workflow that will look at the iTunes music folder for anything that was added today and then copy the songs to my server. After creating and testing the workflow, I saved it as an iCal plugin that runs every night.
This works great on the iMac that is at home with the server which is pretty much always mounted. However, if the server is not mounted there was an error in the workflow as there was no place to copy the files to. Automator to the rescue! I made another workflow that will mount my server, and I have this set up to run first in iCal. I tried to do this all as one workflow, but it would never work correctly. I will continue to play with it and see if I can get it all as one workflow.
So, now the iMac is automatically mounting my server, and copying any new music to it. How to get this new aural goodness to my MacBook. Since iTunes does not monitor folder (maybe in iTunes 9, please) I have more Automator voodoo to take care of it for me.
I started with the script to mount my server as my MacBook is not at home most of the time. Then I have a second script that will look at the New Music folder on the server (that is target for the iMac workflow), and if it finds and Audio files that were added today, it will import them into iTunes. You can choose a specific playlist or just to the iTunes library. So far this is working really well for getting the new music from the iMac to the MBP. I will be writing a second batch of workflow to go the other way (From MBP to the iMac). If all goes as planned I will not have to manually manage the music between the machines.
I will update with any issues that I run into as time goes by…
–edit – fixed images —