I looked around the web to find the best software to manage music on my new toy. I was surprised what I found, since there are quite a few really great tools out there.
Basic features I was looking for:
- as small and fast as possible,
- it should work well with my disk based mp3 library or WinAmp media library,
- free,
- must be able to transfer music to and from iPod with ease (no, it's not self understood!)
These are the tools that I tried:
- iTunes (Free) - Basic Apple product for managing your music. Since you cannot use iTunes Store outside US it's big, slow and is missing some features.
- ephPod (Freeware) - It looks cool, works OK, but it just didn't feel right for me. It seems it needs some more work.
- ml_iPod - (Open Source) - It's WinAmp iPod plug-in which is really cool, integrates great with WinAmp media library, but it has a major issue: it can only synchronize complete library which is completely stupid. A just want to synchronize part of it.
- Anapod Explorer ($25, Free trial) - It's the best music manager I found and has more features that you can think of. It can even stream music from iPod over the network and you can query you music database with SQL. It's not free, but it's the only tool that I found that can do everything I want and then some!
I went for Anapod and registered it tonight. I can say it's well worth the money!
You can find more iPod Windows software links on iPodLounge.