Can I give my iPod Touch to a friend and still keep our music separate in my iTunes?

Yes, it will.

Your library will sync to one device (as far as I know). This stops people from hooking 10 iPods up to their libraries in an effort to circumvent copyright laws.

You should be able to manage this. Just give each of you a separate playlist, and set your iTunes to manage your iPod manually. Then, when your iPod is connected, select only your playlist to be updated, and when his is connected, select only his playlist. Presto.

As @dappled_leaves correctly points out, you must disable auto-syncing and do it manually. Otherwise, you will wipe it the first time you hook it to your computer.

I don’t recommend syncing in any situation, shape or form.

Instead, both of you can go to: In iTunes: Edit>preferences>Devices

Here you’ll see a box that says, “Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically” Be sure that box is check marked. Click ok.

You should be safe now. I suggest backing up your ipod at least twice a month to make sure you don’t lose any data. To do this, when your ipod is plugged in to your computer, click on the name of your device and click on transfer purchases.

@AshlynM To say that you don’t recommend syncing is to say that you don’t recommend adding any new music… every time you update the collection on your iPod, you are syncing it to something. But it needn’t be your entire iTunes collection. If you manage your iPod manually (i.e. disable Auto-sync), then you can choose which files are updated.

Because both of your collections are on the same iTunes, you can screw this up and still fix it, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the process. Unless you have a lot of music files; then it would be time-consuming to do over.

I have never used the sync option. It’s just as easy to manually add your music and videos.

It’s semantics.

I will try managing this issue with us having separate laptops. It would be cool to be able to use the iCloud feature but with different device names. I will let you know how that works out. Any music he adds through iTunes would have to be purchased (unless an imported cd) so it shouldn’t matter in reality… this is one reason I don’t care for iTunes. I can only have so many computers synced to my library. What about an old one that my sister deleted on her computer? It isn’t fair that it should be counted against me. If it hasn’t been active in a year it would be nice that it would “fall away” from my active devices libarary list. hmmmm… in a perfect world…