by Adam Pash
Click to viewEveryone loves the iPod. Not everyone loves iTunes. It's not that iTunes is a bad application, but it does limit what you can do with your iPod.
This week I'll show you how to free yourself from the one computer, one music library shackles of iTunes using alternative software for managing the iPod. When you're done here, you'll be able to add music and movies to your iPod from any computer - and retain almost every other useful feature iTunes brings to your iPod.
Why would I want to do this?
If you've never felt restricted by iTunes, then this probably isn't for you. iTunes is a pretty good music management application, but it has limitations. If you've bumped up against these limitations one too many times (like iTunes' lock-in of your iPod to one music library), you may be ready to ditch iTunes altogether in order to get what you want. That's what this article is about.
If this idea sounds familiar, it may be because I wrote about it last year in the form of the self-sustaining iPod. Since then, there have been a lot of changes on the portable, self-sustaining iPod front, and the landscape for leaving iTunes in the dust is brighter than ever.
What you'll need:
First, if you haven't already, you'll need to enable your iPod as a portable hard drive. Once you've got that done, you're ready to soup up your iPod.
Using the four applications below, your iPod will be ready to do all sorts of damage without iTunes holding it back. You will be able to slurp new music and videos to your iPod from any computer with Floola, subscribe to and download new podcasts with MyPodder, playback your iPod's music on your computer with Pod Player, and rip CDs to MP3s on-the-go with CDex.
Sync music and movies with Floola: Floola is a freeware, cross platform application that lets you copy music and videos to and from your iPod from and to any computer.
We've seen free software that covers similar territory in the past (like YamiPod or vPod), but Floola is the first application I've seen that is cross platform and lets you sync both audio and video to your iPod, which is a must for anyone with a video-capable iPod.
Floola is actually capable of doing a lot more - like managing your music, playlists, and artwork, finding and removing duplicate songs, integrating with Last.fm, and playing your iPod's music on a computer [1] - but that's not what we're most concerned with here.
The important thing is that with Floola you can add music and videos to your iPod from any computer, and all it takes is a simple drag-and-drop. That means you're no longer locked into any one computer or iTunes library. You can add music or videos to your iPod from a friend's computer just as easily as from your own. And since Floola is cross platform, that means that you can put the Windows and Mac versions of Floola on your iPod and add songs from either a PC or a Mac (awesome, right?).
What's more, you'd be very surprised to see how quickly and easily you can add an album or two to your iPod from any computer using Floola. And did I mention you can just as easily copy music and movies from your iPod to any computer?
To install Floola on your iPod, just download the OS-appropriate version and drag the app to your iPod. Double-click it and you're ready to go (if you have trouble installing Floola, follow these instructions).
Sync podcasts to your iPod with MyPodder: MyPodder is a freeware, cross platform software for downloading podcasts directly to your MP3 player. Although Floola claims to support podcast downloading and management, I had trouble getting the podcast feature to work when I was testing it on my iPod, and frankly, MyPodder is by far the more robust solution at the moment.
In order to use MyPodder, you'll need an account with the Podcast Ready web site. Then just follow along with the instructions for installing MyPodder to your iPod. After it's all set up, you can run MyPodder off your iPod on any computer (just like Floola) to update your iPod's podcasts.
The current version of MyPodder does a great job of adding your downloaded podcasts directly to your iPod as it downloads them, so you don't even need to use Floola to add those downloaded MP3s to your iPod. You can manage all of your podcasts from MyPodder (i.e., add/remove/download), which is very handy.
Play your iPod's music on your computer with Pod Player: [2] When you're not listening to your music on-the-go on your iPod, you can use the freeware application Pod Player to playback your music on any computer you plug your iPod into.
Like I said, Floola is able to handle playback, but at this point I've found Pod Player to be a much more capable player than Floola for Windows computers (which was a bit slow in comparison).
Rip CDs to MP3s with CDex: With the free, open source program, CDex, you can rip a CD on-the-go to your iPod, then use Floola (or whatever syncing app you've chosen) to put the newly-ripped MP3s onto your iPod. I covered how to do this in my previous self-sustaining iPod here (step 2).
And that's that. With those four portable applications, you should have yourself a fully-functioning, self-sustaining iPod. If you've got your own methods for using your iPod free of the chains of iTunes, lets hear about it in the comments.
Adam Pash is an senior editor for Lifehacker who loves being able to add music to his iPod from anyone's computer. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Windows users will most likely find Pod Player to work better than Floola for music playback; however, Floola worked much more smoothly for playback on my Mac, so the lack of Pod Player for Mac users shouldn't be a problem. In time, as development continues, Floola may replace the need for any of the other applications. [back up]
[2] Both Floola and MyPodder work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Pod Player and CDex, however, are Windows-only. [back up]