[The Godfather]

Somewhere I read that your iPod will only synchronize to 1 Mac with iTunes. And if you are to plop the MP3s from another computer, you have to use Firewire Drive mode (a very small hassle). Apple says they won't support synchronization with two Macs, which makes some sense and some nonsense at the same time.

However, can 2 iPods be synchronized from the same Mac? What if your whole family owns 1 iMac and everybody has MP3s in it? How does it behave in this case? Will the Mac synchronize all iPods the same with the entire family's music collection? Will it identify the individual iPods and upload what's in their personal OSX account? Will the Mac upload the music from whatever account is active at the time, maybe exposing the 10 year-old to Marilyn Manson stuff?

If a family has 2 or more iPods, and iPods are firewire devices, can they be daisychained and have them all sychronized and the same time? With the correct playlists?

If anyone has experience with multiple iPods, please post.

Just plain curiosity.

[rjenkinson]

what i would do is create an account for each member of your family, then install itunes in each of their home directories. when someone logs in to their account and connects their ipod to your mac, only their own music would be automatically updated. you could also run a single copy of itunes and set it to manually update any ipod that is connected to the machine... either would work fine.

i don't think you can daisychain a number of ipods together since each one only has a single firewire port (although perhaps using a hub would work?).

-r.

[kevcarl]

I read in a FAQ on the apple site that you can use multiple iPods with one mac, and even one copy of iTunes. It didn't go into much detail, but it said that each iPod would be recognized individually. But I do think if you want totally segregated collections of music (as opposed to just different playlists within one copy of iTunes) you should have different logins for each user, and different collections of music for each user.

[scaught]

ya. when you set up your ipod you get a chance to name it. assuming everyone names their ipod something different, there shouldnt be an issue. i would only ever set my ipod for "manual transfers" so i think that would avoid any issues from the get. i wonder what happens if you plug in 2 ipods at once though...anyone have any field experience in this matter?

[jed]

I would imagine they show up as 2 separate "disks" in the "source" window in iTunes, but I could be mistaken. My Rio player (I'm poor) shows up as two separate things for the internal and smartmedia card each.

[Marook]

Hi All.

The iPod has a name, and I guess a ID number that iTunes used to reference the correct iPod. The Preference Pane for the iPod should be for the iPod you have selected (that's why you can only set iPod prefs when an iPod is selected in iTunes). So it should be quite possible to have one copy of iTunes (in single or multi users) and severalt iPods eash with it's onwn prefs.

Hit it.