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Apple's iPod is a great piece of equipment but iTunes never really worked for me. iTunes is great for the masses that have simple requirement for listening to music, but when you are outside of the siimple use cases using iTunes to manage your iPod becomes much more difficult. If you have all of your music on one computer, and all of your music fits on your iPod then you are golden, load up the iPod and listen away. But if your music is on a remote computer such as a network share, or if your music library is larger than the the capacity of your iPod then you probably have more problems with iTunes.

I find that iTunes is too dependent on it's library, and metadata to work well with a large remote library that is accessible over the network. If you are using a network store for your files, you likely won't want to copy the entire library files to the machine running iTunes, in the advanced preferences you can uncheck the 'copy files when importing to library' option. Even if you do this there is still a lot of metadata that iTunes creates making it a slow process to import all the songs to the iTunes library. I feel that it would work better if you could simply drag files from the finder onto the ipod skipping the library stuff that iTunes forces you to do.

Library programs are cool, I used Media Monkey on windows and liked it's random and party mix options. But I found that having the library tied to one computer was always a pain for me. So I'm just looking for a solution that will allow me to manage music on my iPod without any library overhead, Even if I can't take advantage of some cool auto playlists.

However, I do love the iTunes podcast aggregator, I think it works really well and I'd like to keep using it for podcasts.

There are 3 other iTunes alternatives Songbird, Floola, and YamiPod. My ultimate goal was a program that pays well with the iTunes Podcasts and had no overhead for putting music on the iPod from across my LAN.

I didn't look too hard at Songbird, while it looks like a cool replacement for iTunes. it seems to have the same library heavy organization that I'm trying to avoid. Floola looked nice, it had podcast support that might of allowed me to leave itunes in the dust but seemed a little bit buggy, YamiPod worked very similarly to Floola except no podcasting. It also could run from the ipod if you wanted to run it from several computers. Both Floola and Yami just let you drag songs from the finder into the application and they were imported to the iPod.

Afterwards when the iPod was connected to iTunes, iTunes didn't seem to care about the new music and just did it's podcasting work.

It's just about perfect for what I was looking for. The only thing I wish I had was the ability so create a playlist of songs from my music library that I have not listened to in a while. But since I don't want to load my Library into an iTunes type music library database I'm not too worried about it.

Well that's about it. Sometime tomorrow or Monday I'm gonna be a daddy wheee.