Make two or more iPods play nice with one iTunes library

Following up on C.K.'s pointer to
MacOSXHints about how to
Share One Music Folder between Two iTunes Libraries, I thought I'd cover another common iTunes sharing issue – how to share a single iTunes library with multiple iPods.

Ok, so not everyone has 7 iPods like me, but the multiPod household is more and more common these days and much to my surprise, many families prefer to share a single OS X account.

Here's a question I received recently:

We have a 40gig and a 4gig ipod and can't figure out how to manage both of the from the same computer.  I
suppose if both were the same size it would be easy to copy the whole library to each.  But when you plug the smaller one in it says "do you want to replace music on this ipod with the 40 gig iPod's library?" What I want to do is update the smaller one with selected files from the larger one.

No hacks required for this one, so put down your Unix reference book and back away from the command line.

This is a question I am asked frequently, so I assumed it must not be documented anywhere obvious. But it is!
Apple's Knowledgebase Article 300432 covers it quite thoroughly.

The easiest way to share is to mount an iPod, go into the iPod Options preference in iTunes and change the
"auto-update" option that makes iTunes want to sync your entire iTunes library every time you plug in an iPod to sync only selected playlists. This preferences is unique to each iPod so as long as you give your iPods unique names, iTunes will recognize the correct one and sync according to that iPods preferences.

Now wasn't that simple?