Any way to have two identical versions of iTunes on different machines?

Question

Hello, probably a fairly basic question, but I'm quite a new iPod/iTunes user and need some urgent help.
I have my iTunes and music library set up fine on my PC with Windows XP, and all of the according media is stored on my iPod. But I would like to transfer all of my existing library to my laptop, which runs Vista, so effectively having TWO identical libraries to the same user, but on two different machines. I'm wondering if anyone knows the easiest way to do this? I've tried a direct transfer and then import on my iTunes library (with the 'iTunes music' folder, which for some reason contains about a fifth of the music that is actually in the library itself), but this didn't work, as only about 700 of 5000 or so songs showed up in the new iTunes library (on the laptop)!
Any help? Hope this makes sense. Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, it can be done, but it's not the standard thing to do. The first thing to note is that iTunes contains full path references to all your media. Windows XP & Windows Vista have different naming conventions for the default documents folders so under XP you'd expect to find the iTunes library at C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\My Documents\My Music\iTunes whereas under Vista it will be at C:\Users\<User>\Documents\Music\iTunes. If you are copying your library from XP to Vista you should put it at exactly the same path that it had on XP and then tweak the options in the Vista version to point to your desired location.
Connect your laptop & desktop together over a network & share the Music folders on both. Grab a free tool called SyncToy 2.0 and use it to create a pair of syncronised folders. This will allow you to make changes to one library, and then connect the two machines and re-sync. As a bonus you will be able to auto-sync your iPod with either library. It only becomes difficult if you make independant changes on each machine between syncing - the most recently updated files should overwrite the older ones, but the library can end up with out of date information. The following tools can help out here.
*Adding new items/removing orphans*
Try iTunes Folder Watch or iTunes Library Updater. Folder Watch is much faster on the adding files front, can be set to run in the background and includes a useful exclusion feature, however it’s really slow at removing orphans. iTLU is better for this although doing it manually after looking at a list of proposed removals generated by Folder Watch is probably faster still. iTLU can also be set to update iTunes when you've used 3rd party tools to change tag info.
Disable Windows Media Player's "Automatically update missing information" feature on both machines as this has a tendacncy to "touch" files without adding useful info. and wipes out the iTunes "No. of Tracks" field.
tt2