Help syncing iTunes between two Macs

[dpriest]

I am wanting to do something that is very easy on the PC side with the Mac side and hope it is just as easy and I'm looking for advice please.

In my "primary" house, I have my iTunes library and all my music in my local iMac music folder, and all my movies on an external hard drive.

In my "secondary house" which is a summer house, I would like to duplicate the same setup as my primary house. I am using an old MacBook Pro I as a media server and will have an external hard drive connected to it.

Here is where I am not sure how to do this. With the PC it was easy because I could assign the external drives the same drive letter and when I changed my media and library from my primary house, I would copy and paste my iTunes library to the secondary computer and then synchronize the media from one external drive to the other. How can I do this with two macs so both external drives are recognized as the same path?

 

[Just_Me_D]

I'm sorry if I've misunderstood your post, but wouldn't Home Sharing solve the problem?

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202190

 

[doogald]

Home Sharing won't help because that only helps on the same network, and this would be two different homes, two different local area networks. They won't see each other.

One method would be to pay Apple $25/year for iTunes Match (or iTunes Cloud Library, whatever Apple calls it now) and just sign in to your account in the second location. iTunes Match info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht204146

As for duplicating the method on Windows, I would **think** that naming the two external drives exactly the same name would be the answer. Then you could just copy the iTunes library to the new location. Of course, without iTunes Match, you would lose the ability to sync play counts, last play date, etc., but I am guessing that you do not care about that.

On my Mac mini, where I have my library stored on an external drive, the Preferences / Advanced / iTunes Media Location is /Volumes/miniStack/iTunes

So, if your external drive has the same name at the second location as you have at your primary home, iTunes should be able to find the media, and you'll be fine.