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iPod without iTunes

A few days ago I bought a iPod shuffle. You know one of those tiny things with 1 Go of memory on it with no LCD display of any sort to see what tune is playing but eh that's enough.

I was a bit annoyed when I asked the sale lady if I had to use iTunes to upload my songs on it. Indeed, not that iTunes is not a nice piece of software, I found it pretty intrusive and not so friendly to me, it controls too many things in my view. Plus if doesn't really put the files on the devices in a nice UMS (universal mass storage) should be. You end up with folder and renamed songs on your device making it unfriendly, especially with something like the most simpliest of the iPod: the shuffle. Not to mention that you cannot use our iPod with more than one computer using iTunes... bad...really bad. Well then you end up buying 2 iPod..NOT!
Anyhow I have found a few solutions:

1. Winamp 5.2
2. vPod
3. iShuffle
4. Play with iTunesSD

1. I realized quite with surprise that my good old winamp (version 5.2 and up only, you'll need a plugins for earlier versions) support iPod devices and other music devices. So you can use the media library to drag and drop your tunes to the podpod. Quite Handy no hassles and I am sure Winamp is a good party - always get the minimal version tho! Well it will still use the Apple iPod format of your songs.
2. When I first tried to find something to use my iPod without iTunes I found this: vPod. This piece of software reads the iTunesSD and shows for you the content of the iPod, plus allows you to download tunes into your device. Easy, simple I like that. You can also removed your tunes from the podpod off course.

3. this iPod shuffle is simple, it is just a media storage with a mp3 playing chipset. A nice guy created a clever soft to manipulate the iTunesSD music DB of the suffle to point to somewhere else. Simply drag your files in to a directory of your shuffle, synchronize your DB with this soft and voilà! That is what I call nice and clean.

4. I started to have a look at this DB that tell your iPod and iTunes where the songs are. Well I have not been playing with it a lot (only 1 hour) and here is what I found, a nice website with the explanation of the content it. I dont have time to play with it, but it could be interesting, especially as I have seen a few ipod class for some programming stuff.