spherebox

Most people who own iPods would probably have iTunes installed to transfer/organise music on their iPod and most likely be coerced to use iTunes as their music player on their computer (it’s so tightly integrated that Apple labels it as iPod + iTunes, and apple.com/ipod goes to apple.com/itunes).

Unfortunately, I absolutely loathe iTunes (slow and clunky) and am already perfectly happy with foobar2000 as my music player. Thankfully, I’m not the only one with that mindset..

One software which I’ve been using for quite awhile now instead of iTunes is called YamiPod. An acronym for ‘Yet another iPod manager’, it is a freeware application with versions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It does not require any installation and basically runs straight after extracting it to a location of your choice.

For the first start of YamiPod, you would be prompted to select the type of iPod you have (and/or the generation). This would only have to be done once and it would remember the next time you connect your iPod. Once that’s sorted out, you would be presented with a simple interface which supports drag and drop from Explorer/My Computer (for Windows). Screenshots of it can be found here.

A list of other iPod managers can be found here. I have yet to try any others, so if you have tried another which you think is much better, feel free to let us know. :)

And for those of you who think iTunes is the best music player, do try out foobar2000. It’s highly customisable, extensible and not bloated with crap. You can check out the configuration I’m using here.