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.

SyncTunes 1.1 is now available for download and update in the Mac App Store. The features and fixes for this release are described in the coming soon post.  We certainly hope that the performance improvements and new filtering options will make it easier to keep your libraries in sync.

Work has begun on our next big release which adds options for making syncing parts of your library even easier.  For example, you will be able to just select the artists, albums or playlists that you want to keep in sync and SyncTunes will synchronize all of the items in that set with just one click.  Of course you will also be able to use the current method of choosing any set of tracks or syncing your entire library but these new options will open up new ways of keeping your iTunes libraries up-to-date.

Stay tuned for more information on the next update.

SyncTunes version 1.1 has been uploaded to the Mac App Store. This version includes the ability to filter the media list by content type making it much easier to show only the media types that you want to see for syncing. SyncTunes version 1.0.2 added the ability to sync television shows, movies, music videos, podcast files and other media types but some users want to only show some of these types in the sync window so version 1.1 will let you choose which types you want to see in the list.

Version 1.1 also includes several stability and performance fixes. The biggest change will be seen on large libraries where the comparison of the libraries will take significantly less time once the library has been loaded. In addition, a couple of crashing issues were found and fixed. SyncTunes 1.1 will be available as a free update as soon as it is approved by Apple.

Apple has approved SyncTunes version 1.0.2 and it is now available for download from the Mac App Store. The details of this release can be found here.

Version 1.0.2 of SyncTunes was uploaded to the Mac App Store today.  This update includes a number of enhancements to make it faster and easier to sync your music and videos between iTunes libraries on different computers.

The biggest new feature is that SyncTunes now supports syncing videos as well as audio files.  Now you can easily download your movies, TV shows or music videos and keep metadata and play counts in sync on all of your Macs.

The next big improvement comes in the area of performance.  Transferring large files in 1.0.1 could end up taking a surprisingly long time and version 1.0.2 solves this speeding up transfers in some cases by more than 10 times.

Several other issues are resolved in this release:
✦ The mini window can now be minimized to the dock
✦ You can now synchronize tracks that are missing an album or artist name
✦ When play counts differ between the local and remote version, the list will now show both versions (the local version is always listed first in this case)
✦ Fixed a problem where transferred file names could end up with percent escapes in their names
✦ Comparing libraries now happens in the background and is less disruptive.
✦ While transferring large videos is now possible, there may still be performance problems if the file size approaches the amount of memory on the computer (transferring multi gigabyte videos on a Mac with only one or two gigs of RAM could see these slowdowns).  In most circumstances, this should not be a problem.

As soon as the update is approved by Apple, it will be available for a free upgrade to all users.

It has been a while since we introduced a new application on the Mac platform. The last one was CourseBuilder for TeeShot back in 2008 and before that you need to go back to DragStrip about 10 years ago. With the launch of the Mac App Store and the easier access it brings to Mac users around the world, though, it is time to jump back into the Mac software space and start developing the utility applications that we love to build.

SyncTunes 1.0 is an application built out of a need. Like many Mac users, I have more than one Mac. Actually, I have four that I use on a regular basis (my laptop, my work desktop, my home desktop and a shared iMac at home. I listen to music on all of these but many of my smart playlists are based on play counts and ratings and each time I play a song or rate on one computer, the other computers don’t see those changes. SyncTunes to the rescue!

Now I can just connect to the other machines, select the songs I want to sync and click Sync Selection (or keep everything in sync by just clicking Sync All) and within a few seconds, all of the machines are up to date.

SyncTunes 1.0 is just the beginning, though. We are already working on the next version which includes features to make it even easier to keep your whole library or a regular subset in sync. If you have suggestions for how to make SyncTunes better, please let us know. With your support, SyncTunes will keep getting easier, faster and better at keeping your libraries up to date.

While Poppybank Software’s website was the home of many Mac software utilities from 1996 to 2004, it has been off the web for the last several years as we experimented with different products and company names (TeeShot Software, Pic-Z Software, TweedCase.com to name a few). This year, it is all coming back under the Poppybank Software name again and this site is the hub for all of the excitement.