Topic: Suggestions for iPod software?

[firestorm225]

Hey yall, I finally got my first iPod ever (borrowing it from my brother actually), and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for software to transfer music to it. I really hate iTunes and the whole synching thing (basically the iPod mirroring your iTunes library). I want to be able to drag and drop songs to the iPod and also remove any that I don't want on a whim. Any suggestions?

[Pugnate]

AAAAH a ghost!

[angrykeebler]

I'm scared!

[scottws]

Winamp.

[iPPi]

I am not aware of any software you can use to transfer music to an iPod beyond iTunes.  That's why I never kept the iPod I got and ended up with a Creative Zen mp3 player. 

[firestorm225]

Thanks for the suggestions. And yes, I'm still alive. Taking a break from California and working at Project Vote Smart during the winter in rural Montana.

[idolminds]

You can try Songbird. I heard it syncs ipods.

Man, I want to go visit Montana again. That place is amazing.

[ren]

You can do this with iTunes. Just turn off auto-sync and then drag music from windows explorer straight to the ipod symbol in iTunes.

[firestorm225]

Well, I expanded the iPod symbol thing and tried dragging music onto the Music folder under iPod. It seemed like the music was transferring to the iPod and the amount of space on the iPod went up, but then it would return to the original size and none of the music transferred. I'll try again tomorrow I guess when I find my iPod.

And yes, Montana has been pretty freakin incredible. I'm taking the quarter off from school and doing a 10 week internship here, and I've enjoyed it so much I'll probably come back in the summer if my job offer in the bay area doesn't work out after I graduate in the spring. It did take a bit of time getting adjusted from living in San Francisco to living and working here. But I think I've gotten used to it. Seeing that lunar eclipse a couple days ago in a place with practically no light pollution was quite a treat.

[idolminds]

Haha! Man, I was right around there. My aunt lives in Hungry Horse, "just" north of you. Ever bored one weekend drive up and check out the dam. Its cool.

[scottws]

Just use Winamp.  It supports the drag-and-drop functionality you want.

[shock]

Nice to see you, Firestorm!

[firestorm225]

Thanks for the replies. I got the iPod working fine.

And idol, apparently we're gonna have a staff trip to Whitefish in two weeks so I should be able to stop by Hungry Horse before I get out of here.

[W7RE]

I've been using iTunes with my iPod Shuffle since I got it, but I just downloaded the new Winamp and have been messing with it. I'm pretty much using it like I would iTunes, though there are some differences.

The one thing I liked though is that I was able to copy some .flac files to the iPod successfully. They took longer to copy over, so I'm assuming Winamp converted them in the process. iTunes on the other hand said, "wtf is .flac? I won't even import that into the iTunes media library."

[scottws]

The one thing I liked though is that I was able to copy some .flac files to the iPod successfully. They took longer to copy over, so I'm assuming Winamp converted them in the process. iTunes on the other hand said, "wtf is .flac? I won't even import that into the iTunes media library."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the iPod only supports MP3, MP4, and Apple Lossless.  So Winamp almost surely converted them to some other format.

[W7RE]

There is one issue I'm having with Winamp, and I'm sure it stems from my iPod being a Shuffle. I can't really identify how it's deciding to arrange the songs on my iPod, but it's probably the order that I put them on there. the iPod Shuffle isn't designed to use playlists, it just plays the songs in order or on shuffle.

The problem is, Winamp lists the songs on it by artist, not the order they appear on the iPod. I also see no way to rearrange them once they're on the iPod, which iTunes allows you to do just by dragging them up or down. I tried creating a playlist on the iPod, but that didn't work. The only way I was able to make sure the songs got on there in the order I wanted them was to make a local playlist, then right click it and do "send to Wyre's iPod". Since my USB doesn't seem to be working as 2.0, this took close to an hour.