Since our RT system is currently down and I'm not actually sure what I'm supposed to be doing right now, I figured I would take the opportunity to experiment.
I had a full iTunes library on my PC here at work, and was syncing my ipod from it. The problem is, I don't want to take any time at work (or stay later than usual) to do miscellaneous maintenance on my library, so it's falling a bit into disrepair. I got a bigger hard disk for my old iMac at home (hopefully to be soonish replaced with a spiff new iMac) so I decided to experiment. I borrowed a USB enclosure and a fast PATA disk, and rsynced /Users/mpatters/Music to it from my work G5 (executor). Then I took it home, and rsynced it to the iMac (reaper). I plugged my iPod in at home, and iTunes figured it could manage it no problem - didn't even warn me that it was being managed by another machine and did I want to switch it - and It Just Worked, hurray. I listened to and deleted some podcasts, just ducky.
So I brought my iPod back to work and plugged it into executor. It promptly copied all the podcasts back. So I figured I'd try to do in iTunes 7 what used to be called "update manually" in iTunes 6.
I now have an empty iPod. sigh.
Well, I can always re-sync it from reaper, but it's going to be a boring walk home.
There must be some way to do this - I like autoupdating the ipod from iTunes, so I'd like to keep the connection between it and reaper, but I also like listening to music at work. Perhaps the thing to do is to mount the iPod as a hard disk, then tell iTunes on executor that the music library lives at /Volumes/myipod - that worked once when I tried it with a Powerbook, anyway. Then I can free up a bunch of disk space on my work machine, but I'll also need to either remember to always haul my iPod USB cable around, or else purchase a second one.
.. Update: I guess I didn't see the manual sync option before, but it'll have to be Monday before I give it another try.