The Apple iPod is the 'Best Foods' of Mayonnaise!

John,

I have a question for you on ipods. I want to know how to download and hear music. (without ITunes) is that possible?

Troy

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Troy,

First off, iPods are gods gift to music. I could not live without one, it is as handy as a microwave oven. The iPod is the 'Firefox' of web browsers, it is the 'Best Foods' of Mayonnaise, it is the 'Snap-On' of tools, are you picking up what I'm laying down?

Now, with that being said...

You will likely need iTunes in order to sync with your iPod. There may be some iTunes clones out there, but I don't know of them. However, You don't have to pay for your music. There are two ways to import music in to iTunes without buying it.

1. Take all of your music CD's and insert them in to your computer one at a time, with in minutes iTunes will rip them and turn them in to MP3's and then send them to your iPod as well.

2. Download MP3's via other software such as limewire, and then just highlight them and drag them in to the iTunes window. iTunes will add them as if they were downloaded.

If you do buy music through iTunes then it will only let you burn a certain amount of Music CD's with each song because the songs are encrypted. The work around for this is to Burn the purchased songs to a CD, delete the original purchased files, then, put the burned CD back in and iTunes will think it is an original music CD from your collection and thus it will import it into iTunes with no encryption.

Better try that with only one song at first to make sure that they didn't fix that on a recent iTunes update.

Another handy hack is called Copypod. Copypod is a handy little program that will allow you to export all of your music from iTunes, and then save it as a backup, or share it with a friend that recently bought an iPod and doesn't have any music, he can import your entire music collection to his iTunes and then of course it will sync with his new iPod and he will have a ton of music.

If I were you I wouldn't try to avoid iTunes, it is a very handy program. Like everything else with the apple name on it, it is quality. Of course some of what I mentioned above is considered illegal but I wouldn't feel too guilty about doing it considering that I suffered a hard drive crash a while back and I called apple and told them what happened and asked them how I could take the songs off from my iPod and put them back in my newly installed iTunes on my new hard drive. There answer was that "it can't be done". I said I legitimately paid for hundreds of songs and now they are lost forever? "yep", I said nope, I will find a way around it, and I did.

Actually, I found two ways around it but I will only give one of those ways as I'm probably begging for a law suit already. This email is also going to be posted in my blog. The work around for transferring the songs from your iPod back to your hard drive is by plugging in and accessing your iPod via windows explorer, it will appear as a hard drive. Click on that folder or drive and highlight it, now click on 'tools' in windows explorer, then select 'folder options' and then 'view'. Now put a check mark next to show hidden files and folders. Now when you click on your iPod in windows explorer and explore the contents in the folders you will find your music. I prefer the Copypod method however, because copypod remembers all of the data that goes along with your music, your rating, the artist title, and so on.

Hope this helps. I will also post this email in my blog which can be found at www.johnswritings.com

Things sure aren't the same without you in the work environment, let me tell yah!

Talk to you later,

John