With SuperSync, you can retrieve a song from a laptop, play or download a song from a home computer while at the office, upload a new album from the road, or back-up an entire music library on a new computer or network drive. It allows visual comparison of two music libraries locally or over the net. With this feature, you can see what music is located in each library. You can select the tracks you want copied from one library to the other, and click Synchronize to begin one or two-way file synchronization.
SuperSync includes integration with iTunes so that any additions to the SuperSync music library can be automatically reflected in iTunes. SuperSync eliminates the need to manually add new music or remove broken links in iTunes. Also, the software includes a beefy library scanner that will clean up your SuperSync and iTunes music libraries, removing broken links to music and adding new tracks.
I use SuperSync to keep the tunes between my desktop and laptops in sync. All your music, movies, and playlists can be moved to all the computers you keep music on. At the Sellers household, we also use it to sync music between our various computers to create a master library.
SuperSync is a breeze to install and set-up. After I download it, I had it up and running on two computers (more on that, in a moment) in less than 10 minutes. However, it will take a bit longer to delve into all the power user features the software offers.
For example, you can compare and merge any two music libraries. You can export all or a subset of your library as a directory of tracks. You can locate and fix iTunes library problems, such as locating corrupt files, deleting duplicates and finding missing tracks.
With SuperSync, you can import media from a hard drive, iPod, or network drive. Plus, you can access your home music library from just about anywhere and share a common library with several iTunes users on a network drive. You can even see and play files from your iPod or iPhone.
In version 3.3, you can update tracks that have modified tags and ratings information across multiple libraries (such as album, artist, genre, track number, rating, etc.) -- such as where a set of tracks in a library is updated to correct a misspelled artist name or track numbers are added. This is a nice update to the syncing app. In fact, SuperSync is designed to make it easy to Propagate these changes in a track’s “meta-data†to other places where the track is saved in a library.
Example metadata includes volume adjustment, grouping, EQ settings, ratings, played counts and beats-per-minute. For movie files, metadata includes episode number, series, and video kind, such as movie, TV show, or music video. Besides the convenient features it had before, SuperSync now makes it easy to move an iTunes library from one machine to another without losing useful metadata.
You’ll need a copy of SuperSync for each Mac and PC that has music on it. (Note: for this review, I used two Macs; I haven’t tried SuperSync on a PC namely because we don’t have any Windows systems at the Macsimum headquarters).
As I said, getting up and going for relatively simply syncing is easy. However, SuperSync does have lots of options, and you’ll need to spend some time in the app to understand how to tap its full potential. But once you do, you’ll be impressed with how much you can accomplish (though I do wish there was a way to "invert" the Artist and Album filtering).
SupersSync costs US$29 for a two-machine license. Family licenses are available for US$39 per five-pack, and US$59 per 10-pack. A demo is available for download and version 3.3 is a free update for registered users.
Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10