Apple only allows you to sync your iPhone with one iTunes library at a time. When you attempt to sync your iPhone with another computer, you get the familiar, “The iPhone is synced with another iTunes library. Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes library?” message.

But what if you want to use your home computer to sync pictures, music, videos and podcasts and your office computer to sync calendar and contact information?

It’s basically a 7 step process which takes some very simple hacking skills.

Step 1 – On your main computer, browse to your iTunes music folder and double click the file named iTunes Music Library.xml to open it in Notepad.

Step 2 – Write down the value of the Library Persistent ID key. (It should look something like 20F830293962CBA4) Take care not to modify the file before closing.

Step 3 - On your secondary computer, browse to your iTunes music folder and create a backup of iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library.itl. Select both files and press Control+c then Control+v on your keyboard. This will make a backup copy of the files.

Step 4 – Double click to open iTunes Music Library.xml in notepad.  Make note of the current Library Persistent ID then change the Library Persistent ID key to the one we wrote down from Step Two and save the file.

Step 5 – Now we will need to open iTunes Library.itl using a HexEditor. You can download HexEdit from here.

Step 6 – Once you have opened iTunes Library.itl using HexEdit, search for the old Library Persistent ID we replaced in Step Four. Do this by clicking Find from the Menubar. Make sure to select Hex as your search type.

Step 7 – Once found, replace the old Library Persistent ID with the one from Part Two and save the file.

You can now launch iTunes and connect your iPhone to the new computer for syncing. Select your iPhone from the list of devices on the left. Notice if now select Manually manage music and videos from the Summary Tab you will no longer be prompted to erase your data, nor will the files on your iPhone be grayed out.

This tutorial is based on the discovery by Andrew Grant. You can check out his blog posting on the subject here:

http://www.andrewgrant.org/2008/03/30/how-to-sync-an-iphone-with-two-or-more-computers.html

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