Giving iTunes The Finger

Geeks have an ongoing love/hate relationship with iTunes, the default music manager for iPods, iPads and iPhones. It's a decent enough music manager but the software itself is rather...restricting. You see, Apple wants to do everything possible to ensure your music collection is only YOUR music collection. In short, expect to be restricted to a single computer if you rely on it.

So somebody asks me today how to add more music to an iPod without having to sync it on their original computer. I admit, it's been some time since I've tried this so I had to do a little research. Well, I found a solution. Two of them in fact (there are more, but you'll have to do that research on your own).

Option A: MediaMonkey
I have to admit, this is one of my favorite music managing tools. It's full-featured and has the ability to add and remove tracks from an iPod without deleting what's already on there (if anyone downloads this and can't do this let me know; there's a good chance you'll still need to have iTunes installed to make it work properly). There are some other features of MediaMonkey you might be interested in. It's my go-to program for editing mp3 tags.

Option B: Floola
Floola is a smaller application that functions on the go. It's a great tool to keep handy on a USB drive. It has a very simple interface but make sure you know the exact model and generation of your device while setting it up. It is possible to corrupt your iPod archive and it'll send your running back to your original computer regardless. Adding and copying tracks can be done using the Item menu. Floola can be a big buggy sometimes so if it doesn't act right, close it and start it up again.

One important thing to remember is to check often for new versions of these programs. Apple doesn't like it when you use anything but their stuff and has a history of changing things up to make it more difficult to use programs like these.