Can I use an iPod without the iTunes software?
The issue here is that iTunes enforces a perhaps uncomfortable organizational hierarchy, where the software gets to decide how things are organized, and the user only gets to choose from a few simple schemes (artist/title/etc). If all of your music is perfectly tagged and you’re keeping 100% of it on your iPod at all times, this is a pretty useful way to go. It’s also useful if you get your digital music from ITMS or rip whole CDs right into iTunes. However, if you (as I do) have a 1GB iPod and want to drop in a few dozen mp3s at a time, organized in a precise way (e.g. 1 folder representing a whole album and 1 folder representing a few miscellaneus mp3s that don’t belong to a single album), and you don’t want to have to use that sonofabitch iTunes to get your files on, the “plain” interface (like Rockbox) is ideal. You grab your files from your HD, drag them onto the removable drive (iPod) in the configuration that you want, and you’re done. Using the file browser in Rockbox is just l
I don’t think you’ll find iTunes as onerous as you seem to think it is. You can use iTunes more or less the way the want – You can drag any selection from the library across to the player. The only annoying part would be importing your songs – But even that is not really too bad – A one-time import of everything you have now (you don’t need to make copies or change the organizational structure) and then use iTunes-LAME to import new cd’s. I have been using iTunes for years as the least irritating way to deal with a boatload of audio, and I only recently got an iPod. While it is more difficult to get stuff off the player, it’s not impossible, and from your description of your intended use, it doesn’t seem like you’ll be doing that very often anyway. All that being said why don’t you look into one of the other large-capacity media players from Archos – They offer a 100Gig model, although I can’t find any notes on battery life.
To be clear, you don’t need to use iTunes to manage music on your iPod, but you do have to use something to write the files to appropriate locations and update the music database stored on the hard disk. You can’t just treat it as a hard disk from the point of view of adding and removing music. You might be able to use a third party firmware that would work the way you want, but then it’s not going to have the standard iPod UI, which is at least part of what you are paying for.
it’s not just itunes, even if you use elphpod you’d still be stuck with the itunes/ipod organisational system if you stay with the apple firmware, and you may find that the ipod method of only being able to select by unhelpfully broad categories that produce oversized awkward lists of mostly junk that you have to scroll through is really annoying if coming from a nested-folders-with-categories-as-well kind of selection system. I’m switching to rockbox for my ipod for this reason. I’ve had it for ages, really tried to love it, but I still don’t like how long it takes to find and select a song. (eg if you select by artist, the list is spammed with zillions of artists with just one song, that you have to scroll through, from compilation albums that only have one song per artist. If you choose by album, the list is spammed by all the albums with only one song attached, due to having lots of songs where you just like the one song and don’t want/have the entire album on the ipod. Genre, simi
