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iLoophole

This post is somewhat in continuation to the post about putting your iTunes library on a portable drive.

Today I went to plug my iPod into the computer and upload some new MP3’s. Since I wasn’t doing it at my home computer, I expected iTunes to demand that I delete the entire contents of the iPod so that I wouldn’t steal music from myself.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the iPod appeared full on iTunes and there was no request to reinitialize it or whatever they call it. It seems, then, that the way iTunes tells “which computer it’s running on” is by some signature (or equivalent) in the library files. I did, after all, follow my own advice and create a symlink for the iTunes library files so that I could put it on a portable drive. Since the library was created on the same computer I originally used to upload songs to the iPod, it seems that as long as the library open in iTunes is the one on my portable drive, the iPod will not be erased when I plug it in.

That’s neat. iTunes maybe an annoying turd sometimes, but at least a lot of things seem to “fall into plate”, such as their overall decent COM interface.

The next thing is of course to set up the symlinks in my iBook and see if it all still functions flawlessly there. But I don’t really care because the iBook is really slow, so I may never try it.

One Trackback/Pingback

  1. Donkeypuss's Wonderful World of Technology on Sunday, June 1, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    […] you may or may not know, I recently made some discoveries that allowed me to put my iTunes library on a portable drive and update my iPod wherever I wanted, […]

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