Accessing and syncing iTunes from a separate computer

My iTunes account and music is currently associated with my old PC which still lives at my parents' house as I have no room in my flat to keep it. I now have a surface pro 4 that I use day to day.

I use an old iPod nano for music and podcasts as my phone battery would die too quickly if I used it for this all day. I tend to update it a few times a year when I go to visit my folks, but I'd like to have more regular control over it and keep my iPod up to date with new podcasts and music using my Surface, but without having many GBs of content stored on its relatively small memory.

Is it possible to achieve this? Can I upload my library to the cloud for free and access and add to it from another device without having to download the contents to local storage?

Phone-wise I've been on android for years so I'm not too familiar with what Apple offers in this regard.

ignition wrote:My iTunes account and music is currently associated with my old PC which still lives at my parents' house as I have no room in my flat to keep it. I now have a surface pro 4 that I use day to day.

I use an old iPod nano for music and podcasts as my phone battery would die too quickly if I used it for this all day. I tend to update it a few times a year when I go to visit my folks, but I'd like to have more regular control over it and keep my iPod up to date with new podcasts and music using my Surface, but without having many GBs of content stored on its relatively small memory.

Is it possible to achieve this? Can I upload my library to the cloud for free and access and add to it from another device without having to download the contents to local storage?

Phone-wise I've been on android for years so I'm not too familiar with what Apple offers in this regard.

If you had a touch it would be ok. but with a Nano it is reliant on iTunes for its content and that needs to be on the device is syncs with.

You could just get a battery pack thing for your phone that can charge it if the battery gets low. I use my phone for music all the time and it doesn't drain the battery anything like it used to, give it a try it will probably be OK.

Would you want to access/sync the iPod from both of the computers? I'm not sure if you can do that, but I think if you want to store your music in the cloud (have you got a OneDrive account or would it be in DropBox or something?) you can probably just change your library location to be a folder in OneDrive (you can definitely select OneDrive folders from the library select menu, at least). So that way all you'd need installed on your Surface itself is iTunes.

Try that, and if it doesn't work then you might have to check out the Symbolic link stuff below:

You might be able to make it work using Symbolic links (basically a fancy shortcut) - I had to set them up on my Surface to get iTunes to save my iPhone backup to my external hard drive because for some reason you're not allowed to officially change where it stores your backups, so you could probably do a similar thing with your whole library.

iTunes is also pretty useless at handling libraries saved on external drives (so if you ever even dare to start iTunes when the drive isn't connected it'll simply change the library location back to it's default, but not tell you), so you can get a script that you can run that will always check if your library is there before starting iTunes to avoid that disaster (I've had far too many times where I'll have ripped a new album into iTunes without realising that my hard drive is turned off, so it makes a brand new library on my C drive and copies the new songs into that library, and then when I notice a few months down the line that it's moved my iTunes library I've got two or three different incomplete libraries scattered around ).

I can't find the link to the script at the moment but if you want it I can post it on here.

You can upload 50,000 songs to Google Play Music for free, and access them on your Surface from the cloud.

As for your iPod Nano, as Errkal said, it's reliant on iTunes so there's not much you can do about this short of buying a laptop, or Frank's instructions above.

You could put a waking great SD into the Surface and use that to store the library, as you have a nano it can't take up much room as they were only 8 or 16gb if a remember rightly.