I've been looking for something like this for years, and this seems to be the first product to actually do what it claims, and not have real problems attempting to do it.

I have over 17000 tracks, and have built up an extensive set of playlists for genres, moods and styles, which I use a lot. This has always been sitting on my "master library" computer, and in the past when I've copied stuff onto my laptop I feel like my collection gains "multiple personality disorder", which then takes some effort to get them consistent again. This seems to be the solution.

I ran Tuneranger overnight on my main library and all playlists... it took most of a night and half a day to copy all the songs. I connected them via ethernet, which gave a fair bit of improvement on the copy speed compared to WiFi. I've since gone away on holidays with my whole library on my laptop, playlists too and that's great, particularly when I did an all-night DJ session at a party while away. Thanks!

One feature that I couldn't see the point of, at first, turned out to be invaluable: filtering. My first attempt to sync libraries I realized that I'd added 60GB of MP4 movies to iTunes to sync with my AppleTV, which is about 55GB too much to fit on my laptop drive. This is where filtering was great... just switch off syncing of video file types, and everything worked fine.

Mind you, the product, as a whole, is not perfect. Yet. There are a few rough behaviour problems and features missing which I would regard as essential. I'm hoping that the version number (0.9.5) is a hint that there's more to come. Here's my short list of what would make this product perfect:

1. Ratings! They don't sync! When you have a big collection of music, the ONLY way to make sense of it is to rate the tracks. I would call this almost a show-stopper.

2. Last Played, Play Count, Date Added. Same as above! I have smart playlists that "rotate" by selecting tracks that "haven't been played for a while"... this information is essential.

3. Smart Playlists. Okay, this might be a bit trickier... it's been a while since I took a look at the APIs that are available for iTunes database manipulation, and I don't know whether this is even possible, but from my point of view I have a LOT of smart playlists... It's gonna be a major pain to recreate them. I dunno... maybe I should go outside and get a life or something...

4. Error dialog box pauses processing. This happens even when you select the "Don't stop for errors" checkbox in preferences. Duh. For some reason (only when syncing the playlists, not the Library), I got a whole lot of errors, and each one paused processing with a dialog box asking me whether I wanted to stop processing. This is just dumb interaction design. Like I'm gonna wanna sit there all night pressing the cancel button when I get an error...

Also, when an error occurred in a playlist sync, the rest of the playlist DIDN'T get synced, or at least a whole lot were missing. A bit disappointing. And, it was pretty hard to see in the logs what the cause of the problem was. Given that the main library sync went off without a problem, I find it a bit odd that it had problems in the playlists. Maybe the author should have a separate "Error Log", apart from the normal log... with verbose logging on, it's almost impossible making sense of it.

5. The "double sliding side-draw'. I'm not a big fan of the "sliding draw" user interface feature at the best of times, but 2 of them, that slide over top of each other? It's a bit daft. Just make your UI pane bigger for the controls, and have a separate window for logging...


Anyway, I think this is a diamond in the rough... I'm hoping the author does a few tweaks to it, but I'm even finding it useful as it is.