Then I came to my senses and remembered the last time that I had gotten so fired up over the next great thing since sliced bread. Ah, yes, just this past January, 2009 I had purchased the PC version Major League Baseball General Manager, developed by Blue Castle Games and published by 2K Sports for Microsoft. What a dog that turned out to be! Same thing, no support and left hanging in wind wondering why it would not work as advertised.

So, I started talking to people who were the I-Pod experts and searching Google for references to the “Wonder Product”. Boy am I glad that I learned my lesson the last time. I can say that I have only heard of one person extolling the virtues of Tune Ranger. Everyone else had absolutely nothing good to say about the product, it’s developer or it’s merchandiser. This many people can’t be wrong.

Any company that will not stand behind it’s product with technical support and wants to charge outrageous processing fees to take their garbage back, is NOT the kind of company that I want to deal with. It leaves me wondering if they are avoiding customer interaction because they themselves can’t fix common problems. Be smart, don’t go near this product. I won’t!

No product can handle every possible scenario, so I set TuneRanger to move anything it "deletes" to a Removed Files folder instead, and I went through every single action it intended to take to confirm or correct as needed. Some screwups in my library were just too much for it to handle automatically, so I did them myself in iTunes. But it was still extremely helpful for TuneRanger to find them for me. The first synch attempt ended with a connection error (and no bad side-effects, as far as I can tell), but the second one worked perfectly, even if it did take an hour or so to finish on my wifi-N network.

I've got no connection to the company, but my first day with the free trial was pretty positive. It cleaned up years of garbage, and what it wasn't able to fix automatically it was at least able to identify so I could do it.

I attempted to remove duplicates using the feature in the software. TuneRanger did a good job of finding all of the duplicates and removing the duplicate copies and the original copies as well. Voila…no more duplicates. Fortunately, instead of deleting the duplicates I just moved them to a different folder. So, now I have just been waiting until I have time to figure out how to copy the music back in.

Acertant has released newer versions of the software. I downloaded and installed the newer versions from Acertant’s website. Unfortunately, I was unable to enter my serial number. A contact to Acertant’s support email was returned within a day (Saturday, no less…) The answer was discouraging…your serial number indicates that you purchased the software from a reseller. Consequently, you must go to the reseller’s website for support or to download any updates. Of course, SmithMicro’s website suggests going to Acertant for updates and support.

In short, I would not recommend this software and especially, I would recommend AGAINST purchasing from SmithMicro.

have you tried just syncing the itunes folders? i keep all of my actual music files on a network drive and have itunes reference it. we have two different user accounts on my Win MCE PC and I just have SyncBack sync the iTunes folders which, since the .mp3′s are elsewhere, just contain the library/meta data info. it seems to work just fine. itunes looks and acts the same no matter which user i’m logged in as. granted, this is my PC solution and i’m not sure it would work on your macs but figured it was worth a mention.