Two Must-Haves for the iPod

Posted on July 2, 2008 by LJ

Welcome to Simple Productivity Blog! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This will allow you to receive updates in your RSS reader every time new content is posted here. If you want to receive updates in your email, click on the envelope in the upper right corner, or use the "Subscribe" link below the blog title.

Please take some time to check out the content on the site. You may comment on any article by scrolling down and using the form at the bottom of all articles. Thanks for visiting!

Every Wednesday is Software Day at SimpleProductivityBlog.

Photo by Oliver Lavery I love my iPod. I love the fact that I can carry all my music with me, plus listen to really great podcasts, and watch movies. However, since I got my iPod, I realized it was sucking major amounts of time out of my schedule. Why? Trying to make iTunes load my iPod.

When I first went to load our music collection onto my iPod, I expected I could point iTunes at the directory where everything was stored, and say ‘import’ and it would be done. After all, that’s what my older MP3 player did.

Nope. I had to drag the folders over. And not all at once, because if I dragged more than 10 iTunes would crash.

Next came movies. I have a lot of space on my iPod, so I decided to put some of my favorite movies on there. It’s a long process, first moving the DVD to my hard drive, then translating to the format iTunes will accept. And then I would sync. Sometimes the movies would go, but more often they would cause iTunes to crash, at which point it would remove all movies from my iPod.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy with iTunes.

I scoured the internet, and came up with two solutions. The first one, iTunes Library Updater, keeps iTunes in sync with a directory structure. For the movie issue, a Lifehacker article provided the solution: Floola. This one piece of software allows me to painlessly move movies and songs to the iPod.

I’m not ready to give up on iTunes completely, though. I do like the way it handles Podcasts. In order to combine all three of these tools, this is what I did: