By Lou Dolinar
Last in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

I love living in the future. Whoda thunk, oh, 20 years ago, when I got my first Walkman, that I would someday be downloading music directly onto my portable music player - along with software to overcome digital rights restrictions.

That is indeed, however, the case with the iPod, which in its native configuration is more than happy to suck music off your PC or Mac, but isn't terribly good at transferring information the other direction. This raises a whole raft of problems for the digital music maven that we discussed here a couple of weeks ago, including backing up and restoring music libraries when your disk drive goes south, as well as coordinating content across several PCs. This one- way street also complicates the lives of music pirates.

Fortunately, a growing number of software companies are writing programs to correct various perceived deficiencies in the iPod and iTunes. Some online clearinghouses I've found useful for keeping up with this kind of software - as well as a fair amount of how-to advice - are www.ipodlounge.com, a commercial site with scads of advertising, and www.ipodhacks.com, a more user-oriented operation with excellent forums, andhttp://www.ipodgarage.com/. Note to Windows users: behave yourselves - Mac users set the tone on these sites.

If simpler is better, then iPod to Folder (www.longfingers.com/ipodfolder/index.php) is an excellent product with a limited scope - it will perform a full backup of your iPod to any folder on the computer that you specify, even across a network to a remote file server. It is free and comes in versions for both the Mac and PC. As I noted in my last column, there's no simple way to save anything but music; playlists and related information evaporate, as does the folder structure. I-to-F solves this problem for free. For Mac users only, another excellent freebie is Senuti, an open-source program that lets you pull individual tracks off the iPod and onto your Mac. You can download at http://wbyoung.ambitiouslemon.com/senuti/

Anapod Explorer (www.redchairsoftware.com, free to try, $25 to buy) runs under Windows and is pretty much the last word in iPod management under that operating system. It has all the transfer functions of iTunes, plus you can pull song files off your pod using the usual Windows Explorer interface and drag-and-drop. I was particularly impressed with the feature Red Chair calls audiomorph: You can keep your music files in a high-quality lossless compressed format on your PC for playback through a lavish home entertainment system, and automatically down-sample to smaller, lower quality files that better fit on the iPod's smallish hard drive. Going the other direction, another feature allows you to plug your iPod into your PC, and play back songs through standard Windows players like WinAmp.

Others worth a look: Pod Access is more Mac-like than Anapod, which is either a bug or a feature depending on which side of the fence you sit. At $14.99 from Findley Designs (http://www.drewfindley.com/findleydesigns/index.html), it comes in both Mac and PC versions. Also popular and worth a look: iPod Music Liberator ($34.99, www.zeleksoftware.com); CopyPod ($19.90, www.copypod.net)

While Apple left Linux users out in the cold with its Windows/ Mac compatibility for iPod, the open source community very quickly took up the challenge of writing a substitute for iTunes. The result is gtkpod, (www.gtkpod.org), which like the other software we discussed today, also allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your PC.

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY, Music transfers made even easier

[NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]

Newsday - Long Island, N.Y.

Author: Lou Dolinar

Date: Jun 26, 2005

Start Page: A.54

Edition: Combined editions

Section: MONEY & CAREERS

Text Word Count: 627

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