Force Your iPhone Into A Threeway

One of the downsides to the Apple/iPhone/iTunes triumvirate is a slavish devotion to a single computer, a single account, and very little in the way of helpful management of multiple libraries or shared libraries that live across several computers.

I'm always confusing myself as to what show or album I downloaded to which computer, and cannot adequately express the number of times I've had to manually consolidate my media and erase/redo my 90GB+ library. Add to that the sometimes-fatal idiosyncrasies of Vista 64 and its love/hate/more-hate relationship with iTunes, and it's fair to say that often I miss the outlaw days of Napster and hassle-free digital media.

Luckily, the folks at tinyfish (awesome name) have posted a fantastic guide to syncing your iPhone with two or more computers. It's not exactly beginner level and it does involve mucking about with your iTunes Music Library.xml file, and it does involve a hex editor, so if that sounds foreign you might want to hold off and wait for a hunky tech-type to show you the ropes. (If it matters, I keep the ropes in the trunk of my car.)

The good news is that the trick works well with iTunes 8, and also with multiple accounts on a single computer. Check it out below!

How to Sync iPhone with multiple computers [tinyfish]