technobabble

RIP iPod Nano

Recently my family ran into a quandary when one of the kids started using a non Apple MP3 player in place of her busted iPod Nano. For several years now my we have all owned and used various forms of Apple iPods so as no surprise, my 60GB music library has been stored and managed in nothing but iTunes. When my step daughter’s Nano broke, she purchased a new SanDisk MP3 player for relatively cheap money, it was a hard deal to pass up. Although its a decent player for her needs, not being an Apple, it does not work with iTunes, so much for access to all the music she’s purchased or ripped into iTunes. I really needed to find a solution.

Enter SongBird

To sum things up, I spent a few months looking into all sorts of options to either make the new MP3 player work with iTunes or find an alternative application that would perform as needed. I won’t go into all the gory details of everything I tried that did not work, no need to bore you with such details. My end results I will say though did work very well and I am very happy to pass and share with you.

All my searching, frustration and few choice words that I muttered on numerous occasions lead me to (re)discover SongBird. As you probably noted, I said rediscover SongBird. This would be because in my occasional tinkering with Linux, I’ve often seen SongBird mentioned as a media player and even launched it a few times but never went beyond that for actual use. It had since sunk to the deep depths of the back of my mind and was forgotten about until my continuous searching for iTunes alternatives started.

SongBird is a very iTUnes like music player with the interface being very similar to iTunes itself and supporting multiple plugins to add additional features and work with multiple types of players, including iPods or features such as lastfm streaming radio. One of the best features I discovered early on is that SongBird will monitor your iTunes library (or any other folder on your PC for that matter) and automatically update new items you’ve added via iTunes. I found this very handy when it comes to songs downloaded from the iTunes store in particular. As a family we use the iTunes store on a fairly regular basis and with the ability of SongBird to automatically update its own library with these new songs, life is good.

I did have a concern with iTunes downloads as they (early downloads from the service in particular) often contain digital rights management, or DRM, to prevent the illegal sharing of the music. More recent downgloads are often of the iTunes Plus variety and do not have DRM. If however you have songs that do contain DRM, there is an easy solution for that as well. Use iTunes to burn the music to an audio CD and then rip it back into iTunes as non DRM protected music. I do plan on a more detailed post of this process soon.

So as you can see, with SongBird, my family is now able to continue using iTunes including store downloads and sync our iPods and pretty much any other MP3 player we may encounter.