Some one is trying to make an open source equivalent of iTunes. You guys might find this to be of interest.
Sounds like a good idea. But it's gonna take it a long, long time to reach the level of functionality displayed by iTunes...
There have been quite a few open source products that have been fairly successful even though they lack the functionality of competing commercial titles. ex: Compare the functionality of MySql to the Oracle Database.
There isn't really that much to iTunes if you think about it. Most of the stuff like disc burning is handled by other processes. The iPod part of iTunes would be the hardest part to code, but there is code that you can take from other open source programs to integrate into the open source player.
IMHO i really like the itunes player for my music. clean and organized. and syncing it w/ my ipod is simple. although i know there are those problems transfering among differnet players. the only thing that i would like would be for itunes to allow me to pull songs off my ipod onto my computer. then again i dont use any of the online music stores. i just buy cds.
You can play back the music from your ipod on any mac/pc (whatever the ipod is formatted for). Using iTunes, set it up so you have to manually update it. Then, when in iTunes, double click on the ipod. All the songs that are on your iPod will come up. You can then double click on any song and play it straight from your iPod.
really? on mine it greys all the songs out when I click on the ipod tab in itunes, so I cant play them. You can get programs to circumvent that - but by default its a built in thing to stop your mates bringing an ipod over and you stealing all their songs! At least thats the impression I had...
Same (albeit not an iBook though). Just the other day i plugged my ipod into Wil's powerbook to play some of my tunes...
Copying Music off of the iPod My brother found a 4 Gig iPod nano a few days ago and brought it to me. I had absolutely no problem at all copying the music off of it. This was a windows formatted iPod. I enabled the explorer option to view hidden files and folders and found the folder with the music in it. They were all renamed to only have 4 characters in the file name, but the music organizing software that I use had no problem renaming them to something more usable. But now that I think about it that's a lot of manual work. I've got two creative Zens (the micro and the vision). The software that comes with them allows you to copy the music off and specify the naming convention that is used when copying music from the player to the computer. I also have a Zen Nano 1 Gig and the 20 Gig Archos gMini400. Both of those players preserver the original files names and folder structure.
