SyncTunes 2.1 was released to the Apple Mac App Store on October 6, bringing a number of enhancements requested by customers and a significant improvement in performance with large libraries.
One of the more common requests was a way to select or deselect all of the items in one of the column lists. Now there is a new checkbox next to the title of the column lists that allows you to do this. Clicking it will either check or uncheck all of the items in the list and if only some of the items in the list are selected, it will display in the mixed state so you can easily tell if some item further down the list is selected.
SyncTunes 2.0 brought the ability to synchronize playlists from the local Mac to the remote Mac. With SyncTunes 2.1, you can now also select playlists from the remote Mac and sync them locally. In addition, we have made the syncing of the playlists happen much faster and it will happen even if all of the songs in the list are not yet transferred (though most of them need to be present on the target Mac before the playlist will be sent). Syncing Smart Playlists is still the same as in 2.0 — the content of the Smart Playlist will be sent but the playlist itself will not, though sending the smart playlist itself is planned for the next release.
Finally, one of the biggest complaints about SyncTunes has come from people with very large libraries with many tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of tracks. The problem was that comparing the libraries could take minutes and until the comparison is done you couldn’t actually synchronize anything. SyncTunes 2.1 has a significant improvement in library loading and comparison that will take only a few seconds where it used to take minutes. This has been validated on libraries with up to 150,000 tracks. Transferring that much data will still take as long as necessary, depending on network speed but SyncTunes 2.1 will now be much more responsive in this situation.
As always, if you have any questions, suggestions or problems with SyncTunes please let us know by contacting our support email address.
SyncTunes 2.0 is a major new release with a lot of great new functionality to make it easier and more flexible to keep your iTunes libraries in sync.
- The UI has been significantly updated to add the ability to browse by media type and to select collections of artists, albums, podcasts, playlists and genres and have those groups sync each time you start SyncTunes and click Sync.
- You can now sync playlists in SyncTunes. If the playlist is a user generated list, it will also send the playlist to the remote machine after syncing the tracks in the playlist is complete. This is a great way to keep your playlists in sync as well as the content.
- Lots of improvements to the networking layer to make connections faster and more reliable.
Playlist Syncing
One of the most common requests has been for syncing playlists between computer. SyncTunes now allows you to sync the content of any playlist in your collection to the remote machine and for any user created playlist (eg. lists where you added specific songs to the playlist). One of the biggest groups of people who have been requesting this has been DJs who build playlists of tracks and want to synchronize both the tracks themselves an the playlist themselves and SyncTunes 2.0 now allows them to do that.
Updated User Interface
SyncTunes 2.0 is also sporting an entirely new UI. SyncTunes primary window includes four lists. The top of the window includes lists you can use to filter the collections of media in your iTunes library while the bottom list will display the individual files that match the selection above. SyncTunes allows you to sync your media in two different ways. First, you can configure a set of content collections and then click the Sync button in the middle of the top of the window and all of the items in those collections will be synchronized between your computers. Second, you can use the filter lists to find a specific set of tracks, select those tracks in the bottom list and click Sync Selected and just those items will be synced.
When you have collections of content that you always want to keep in sync, the simplest way to use SyncTunes is to just select those collections and click Sync. Collections can include artists, albums, playlists, podcast series, or genres. Selecting any of those types in the first list will show those collections in the second list. When you see a collection that you want to keep in sync, just click the checkbox next to it. You can choose different categories of collections to see all of your different options. Selecting an artist will implicitly select all of the albums under that artist (since synchronizing an artist actually synchronizes all of the songs by that artist). SyncTunes will remember the checked collections so that the next time you launch the application and connect to the remote computer, you just need to click Sync and any tracks that have changed will be synchronized.
SyncTunes 2.0 is available today in the Mac App Store and is a free upgrade to all existing users.
