When I set up our CD ripping business, podServe, I looked at several ways of ripping CDs. In the early days MusicMatch did the job. When it arrived iTunes was a breath of fresh air. But from the beginning there have been other ways of getting music on, off or around your iPod. Some were vital in the dawn of the iPod era as some of us were running Windows ME (remember that?) and Apple's offering only ran on XP or their OS. Those were the days. Awful.
For a trip down memory lane I went back to some of the alternatives - were they still there? Did they still work? What's new?
Well, the market for iTunes replacements appears to be thriving. One of the first we tested was Ephpod (www.ephpod.com). This runs on Windows and offers a browser / explorer type of interface which some people might prefer. It also supports 'reverse synchronisation' enabling you to recover tracks from your iPod and load them back onto a PC. This is a vital function when your hard drive crashes or your laptop gets stolen. This product is available from ephpod.com.
In my opinion the market leading podServe saving product is XPlay 2. I have lost count of the number of times this little treasure has saved my bacon or that of a client. Not only can you recover tracks from iPod to PC but you can use Xplay to play music from your iPod through your PC, much as you do with iTunes. You can also recover from drive errors. This is the best (by a nose) $30 I have spent in the last four years - you can invest at mediafour.com.
Hot news - coming soon is XPlay 3, which will add album art functionality (find & install) and significantly integration with Windows Media Player & Media Centre. We'll have to wait until next February so line up patiently behind me with around $15 as an upgrade fee.
Much as I love XPlay I think my most impressive investment was Mike Matheson's iAlbumArt. Great product, outstanding support (I swear Mike never sleeps) and a brilliant way to add album art. $10. Fabulous.
The other product that has stood the test of time is Anapod Explorer - from redchairsoftware.com. Windows still, with a simple drag and drop style of operation. They've kept pace with iPod facilities with added functions to synch photos and the like. Anapod is now a family of products with a maximum price of $30.
One Anapod module is CopyGear. As the name implies this enables you to drag music back from iPod to PC. But - Redchair have released a version of this module to run on Macs. I think they were the first to do this and a very handy utility it is too at a modest $20.
One of my clients loves another iTunes alternative (it came bundled with some diving goggles containing a waterproof MP3 player) is Media Monkey. You guessed it, mediamonkey.com, and there's a long features list albeit Windows only. Price points are free and $20 for the Gold version. Media Monkey offers CD ripping, an album art lookup facility plus a sleep timer feature.
Finally - revolution is afoot in the shape of Floola.
Take a look at floola.com where you can download this cross platform (Mac & PC) system. It's another drag & drop alternative to iTunes, but .....
You can install Floola on your iPod and run it from there, meaning you can run it on any PC. Brilliant.
You can also export your iPod library to HTML files. I'm planning to make use of that very soon. Hop over to floola.com to download Floola for yourself or read more.
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