Two Must-Haves for the iPod

Every Wednesday is Software Day at SimpleProductivityBlog.

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:

• I disabled synching of movies in iTunes
• I left synching of music on in iTunes
• I add music to iTunes through iTunes Library Updater
• I add movies to the iPod with Floola

If anyone has a good recommendation on how better to handle podcasts, I’m all ears!

Photo by Oliver Lavery