iPod voiceover without iTunes

July 2, 2011 4:29 PM

Help me ditch iTunes but keep using my iPod. Difficulty inside.

I have an iPod Shuffle 4G. I want to ditch iTunes, because my media computer uses XBMC and my laptop doesn't have all of my music on it. I tried using CopyTrans, and it works well, except it doesn't seem to update the apple voiceovers. So the songs are unnamed, but worse the playlists are just called "playlist". Not helpful.

I've tried plugging the iPod back into the laptop & getting its voiceover to sort it out, but it doesn't work. I'l point out that the laptop's iTunes reads everything correctly and displays the playlists as it should.

Any suggestions? Moving away from the iPod or Windows 7 (both computers) is not really an option.

posted by Lemurrhea to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

while I am definitely in the running for "person who most hates iTunes", is there a reason you can't share the XBMC machine's media directory and then point iTunes to that as a library location? That way, you don't have to have all of your music directly on your laptop, but you can still sync what you like to your ipod using itunes.
posted by namewithoutwords at 5:14 PM on July 2, 2011

Mediamonkey works really well with my Nano 5g, while almost nothing else will. I don't use voiceover, but I did notice that mediamonkey seemed to be creating the files for it.
posted by HFSH at 5:48 PM on July 2, 2011

Try Doubletwist - http://www.doubletwist.com/
posted by Duug at 2:41 AM on July 3, 2011

Best answer: So it turns out that Mediamonkey was working poorly at best (mainly because I just didn't like the interface), and doubletwist bricked my iPod.

Namewithoutwords, I didn't go with your suggestion because XBMC & iTunes don't play nice in regards to which tags go where, when I'm dealing with compilations and such. I could figure out a way to do it but didn't want to delve back into the XBMC config files. Also, keeping two separate setups means that in case of hard drive failure I'm shielded!

For posterity, what I went with was to use the iTunes Library Updater and point it at my XBMC folder. Batch scripting to work overnight, and I'm in pretty good shape.

Thanks anyways!
posted by Lemurrhea at 12:25 PM on August 5, 2011