Several IPODS in one household question

[disneyred]

Hi,
I hope I am not double posting but... for the life of me I could not find the answer to this question regarding IPODS and I know many members here have them !!
I personally do not... but over the next few months with birthdays coming and xmas just around the corner... several people in my household will be owning IPODS... now we only have 1 PC at home with iTUNES and I have been just looking thru this program to figure out how to use iTunes with the IPOD...
but my question :

Is it easy to have several IPODs using this one iTUNES??? how will all the music be managed between IPODS... is it simple to manage or will there be big problems ahead... thank for any help...

 

[Cindy B]

I'm assuming you are running a windows machine.

My DH and I have Ipods, and my son may get one for Christmas.

There are two ways to approach it.

1) Using Windows 2000, use two different user accounts and have your Itunes set up regarding each consecutive user.

Pros: You can have two totally different set ups in Itunes
Cons: There can be an issue about logging in under someone else, forgetting to log in as yourself, resynching your Ipod to thier things... (ask me about this, I've done it) OR forgetting to log out and having other Ipod owner resynch and getting all your songs... (I've done that as well.)

Needless to say, that approach didn't work in my house.


OR


2) Somehow, my DH was able to coordinate the Itunes software with the serial number to determine whose Ipod is whose (we have the same identical one). When I resynch it will say "Cindy's Ipod". I have my Itunes set to checks, meaning that if I check a song off, I DONT want it on my Ipod.

However, my DH's Ipod, he has his set to UNCHECK songs so his does all his songs and whatever he doesn't like he manually deletes from Itunes.

I'm not sure how he coordinated the software to work like that.

He has continually asked Apple to provide a user name/ID/password combo in Itunes itself for multiple Ipods in one house. He has asked to be involved in beta testing if it ever occurs. He emails them constantly about this very issue.

 

[dejavu]

There are some who will tell you this can be done and it can but I have never been able to figure it out and I have tried and tried- I think you need to be fairly itunes smart to have any luck. Apple has a discussion board and it has been helpful to me, so you might want to check that out. We manage our music manually on itunes which at first is kind of a pain but once you get the hang of it it works great. This reply isn't much help but I thought you would just like to hear one families takeon how to make it work

 

[disneyred]

oh boy, and here I was hoping for a step by step solution... as I am not a very technical person .... now I am not so sure if I want to buy another IPOD, its just that everyone in the family seems to want one... and I thought there was a very straight forward way to manage all these IPODs in iTunes !!
using 1 PC .. and yes, I have windows on my PC..

Anyone else out there with more than one IPOD using 1 PC to manage them ??
thanking in advance....

 

[caitycaity]

i have to say it's a pain to do. we ended up doing a modified version of cindy's check/uncheck system. however, this only really works well if one of the people doesn't have a lot of music on their ipod. my dh only has a shuffle, so it's not a problem for him to manually manage his music. otoh, i have about 5000 songs on my ipod, so i would waste a lot of time if i had to manually manage my music.

my old laptop just died and i ordered a replacement. when it gets here i'm thinking about just moving all of my stuff over to my new laptop.

 

[Cindy B]

i have to say it's a pain to do. we ended up doing a modified version of cindy's check/uncheck system. however, this only really works well if one of the people doesn't have a lot of music on their ipod. my dh only has a shuffle, so it's not a problem for him to manually manage his music. otoh, i have about 5000 songs on my ipod, so i would waste a lot of time if i had to manually manage my music.

my old laptop just died and i ordered a replacement. when it gets here i'm thinking about just moving all of my stuff over to my new laptop.

My DH is buying a laptop where he is going to store his music as well, and mine will stay on the desktop.

Fortunately we have similiar tastes in music so once he ripped all of our CD's, and purchased some songs, all I had to do was uncheck what I didn't like.

Theres over 5000 songs on our Ipods, so it was a pain to do the initial check/uncheck but now its set up in the software that mine Ipod is set up for checks and his is set for unchecks.

 

[ElliEtteInMD]

We're having problems with this. My boys are trying to use the same computer and are not having good luck with 2 iPods on one computer. I'll have my DH research this on the Apple site.

 

[MACUSER]

We have a total of 4 Ipods in our house 2 10gig 1 mini and i new video ipod. We have 16 gig of music so the kids have to make playlists for there music since it will not all fit on there ipods and i have a lot of 80s which they don't like. The easiest way to work with more than one ipod is make you own master play list with all the songs you want on your ipod call it mike's ipod or what ever you want then if you want you make playlists off of that playlist if you like. then go to your ipod options when you plug it in and check automaticly update selected play lists. then go and check your play list you just made and everytime you hook it up it will only update the playlists that you checked so everyone have can there own playlists updated on there own ipod from one cpu .hope this helps if you have any questions feel free to ask or pm me ..

 

[Papa Deuce]

I don't have the answer BUT, for sure, you can find out at:

www.ipodlounge.com

 

[The U]

we've got one windows XP machine and 1 4th gen and 2 Nano's. we went to our Apple store and went to the genius bar. they configured our setup and printed out the instructions to take home. we charge them through the external USB's, and hotswap them when we need updates.

 

[Imzadi]

What if you bought each person a USB flash drive. Then each person can attach their own drive, download the music to it & keep their music separate from everyone else's?