iTunes 9’s Home Sharing lets you drag-and-drop content between up to five computers on your home network after you tie each to your iTunes Store account. SuperSync obliterates Home Sharing’s limitations, letting you sync and share music and videos between as many machines as you like, either over the local network or the wide-open Internet.
That’s its main draw. But it can also restore media from an iPod and export items to an external drive or directory to keep your library backed up. You could keep your whole collection on a NAS drive and use SuperSync to download content to your local machine for syncing to an iPod. And its built-in Web server and TiVo Media Server let you access your MP3s from a Web browser, an iPhone, and your TV.
SuperSync is like iTunes' own sharing, but without any of the pesky rules and limits.
SuperSync is easy to set up. The symbol-heavy, color-coded interface can be confusing at first, but the thorough documentation helps and everything’s tweakable. At any time, the app can be connected to a local library and a remote library, then you can compare the two libraries, so you can decide what to sync. The options are extensive but simple to manage by unchecking boxes to filter out certain file types, duplicates, items missing metadata, and more. Or you can use the browser menus to only sync specific genres, artists, and albums.
SuperSync will only sync to other Mac or Windows computers running SuperSync, so you need a separate license code for each, but multipacks are affordable, and you get free updates for life. Transfer speed depends on your network connection, but we synced a 20GB music library to a new laptop over a local 802.11n Wi-Fi network in just under an hour. Syncing over the Internet requires forwarding the ports on your router, but if your router is UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) compliant, SuperSync can attempt to forward the ports for you.
Web Browser Access (which only supports MP3s) lets you log in from anywhere to listen, using the attractive Flash-based player. An iPhone-optimized player lets you use Mobile Safari to browse and search for tracks, then play them. Plus, SuperSync has a TiVo Media Server (also just for MP3s) that lets you access and play your music through a Series 2 or Series 3 TiVo on the same network. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it to work with a brand-new TiVo HD.
Syncs between any two computers, Mac or Windows, locally or over the Internet. Transfer to and from iPods, external drives, NAS drives, etc. Web access to MP3s from browser or iPhone. Stream MP3s to TiVo Series 2 or 3. Universal binary.
Java-based interface doesn't look especially Mac-like. Doesn't stream to TiVo HD.
