Work banned iTunes, how to get music on the ipod?

December 25, 2009 9:30 AM

Dad's a consultant, and travels constantly for work. Work provides a laptop, but won't let him install iTunes. Is there a way to get music & audiobooks to synch to his ipod through an external drive, or cloud computing or something? Doesn't have to be iTunes, just a way to connect my dad and his music without offending corporate IT.
posted by Caravantea to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Simplify Media - http://www.simplifymedia.com/
Connect itunes to whatever, wherever.

GSpace - http://www.getgspace.com/
Make a gmail account into a media player.

Portable Apps - http://portableapps.com/
Put your music and one of these apps on a thumb drive, go.
posted by eccnineten at 10:06 AM on December 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

I hate to do this, but people are going to need to know OS and platform.

Buying a bootable flash drive would totally work for a mac. He could probably even point to a stored folder on the mac as his music folder, so he could have a lot more space than just the flash drive.

You could then synch to the iPod just fine.

Also, on a mac, iTunes would be a drag and drop app, so he could run it out of his user's folder.

I'm sure there are work arounds like this for the PC as well, but trying to think of them makes my brain hurt.

I am guessing it's a PC, since macs come with iTunes and would need to be removed, not installed. I'm pretty sure the flash option would work here as well.

I do understand the policy of not having this app on a work computer though.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:08 AM on December 25, 2009

If he's on a mac, you can actually have iTunes and your entire library function from an external harddrive. After buying my boyfriend a 1TB external HD for his birthday, he took it to the Apple store where a Genius was more than willing to help him transfer his entire library from an older external HD to his new one, and ended up just linking iTunes directly from the HD, easy peasy.
posted by banannafish at 10:23 AM on December 25, 2009

I used to use Floola which was great for awhile until it crashed and I had to totally re-load my entire ipod. Floola lives on the ipod and you could do just about anything you can do in itunes without installing anything on the computer itself. However it did get a bug, like I said, so i can't give it a complete recommendation.
I've heard that CopyTrans is more stable but I've only used it once or twice.
posted by amethysts at 10:27 AM on December 25, 2009

Response by poster: Oh for crying out loud! ....sorry, Cjorgensen, you're absolutely right. Let's pretend my eggnog was spiked to make me forget such basic information.

Dad's laptop runs Windows XP, though his company may switch to 7 in the future.

Right now they're considering having him use my mother's computer to store his music, but as he can go over a month without being able to go home I'd like to help him find something more convenient.

Thank you for your advice everyone!
posted by Caravantea at 10:47 AM on December 25, 2009

(I'll assume you're on a MS Windows laptop, just because of market share and such, but let us know if it's not a Windows machine, okay?)

eccnineten mentioned portableapps.com, which is a fantastic resource for this sort of thing; but what she didn't mention is that Songbird, probably the best-developed open-source iTunes alternative, is available through portableapps.com as a flash-drive application. On Windows and also Linux, I tend to always prefer Songbird anyway; it doesn't sneak into your operating system and do all kinds of crazy weird stuff like iTunes does. Give it a whirl - you'll find that it's just as easy to use and functional as iTunes. I had a hand-me-down iPod up untl a week ago (gave it away) and Songbird was great for loading it - no weird complicated stuff, just the same plug-and-play ease of iTunes. And it's free and open-source!

Since it's a portable app, all you have to do is get a little USB flash drive and install the portableapps base suite, and then the Songbird portable application. Then, every time you put in your USB drive, you'll get a little menu from which you can run those applications which are stored on your USB drive - and you never have to install anything on the hard drive. This is neat especially for people in a position like your dad is in, because it means having the ability to run all sorts of programs without having to get permission to install them on the hard drive.
posted by koeselitz at 10:56 AM on December 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

Also, now I see he's running XP, so PortableApps should work just fine. It may make a mac user's head hurt to think about solutions for this (heh, sorry, cjorgenson) but this one is actually ridiculously simple. I used to have a job where my computer was as locked-down as the ones at the library usually are - no installing ANYTHING, no user privileges, nothing - but every day I'd sit down, plug in my USB drive, and I'd have all the applicatioions and programs I needed already pre-installed.

This doesn't just work for iTunes replacement, by the way. Check out some of the other applications available, and you'll see there are some great things = GIMP image editing, OpenOffice word-processing and office apps, and a whole lot more. The PortableApps people are pretty dedicated to trying to solve this problem of making applications which are streamlined so that you can carry them from computer to computer like that.
posted by koeselitz at 11:01 AM on December 25, 2009

If he has an ipod touch or iphone, he can download from the itunes store directly. No extra computer required.
posted by squorch at 11:07 AM on December 25, 2009

(By the way, when I say the PortableApps people are "dedicated to making apps portable," I really mean it. It's a neat developer community, and the goal is a good one: to make applications that leave no mark whatsoever on the hard drive after you've used them. So not only can your dad use them easily; he can also use them in the confidence that IT won't get annoyed at any mucking about.)
posted by koeselitz at 11:07 AM on December 25, 2009

(Sorry, one last thing - )

Actually, he doesn't technically need a flash drive at all. If he's able to download and store his music on the machine, I'm sure he can just download Songbird Portable, install it in a directory on the desktop, and run it from there. It'll still be isolated from the registry and the rest of the core operating system, so it shouldn't bother the IT people; the USB thing is just in case they don't want him to put ANYTHING on the laptop, but it doesn't sound like that's the case.

So, yeah: just download and install Songbird Portable.
posted by koeselitz at 11:11 AM on December 25, 2009

Windows Media Player will manage the Ipod and it shouldn't offend IT as it came with the OS.
posted by COD at 11:54 AM on December 25, 2009

How about lala? You can use the music mover to flag all the songs of which you have mp3s on your computer (no matter where you got them) for unlimited plays online. This has the benefit of needing no install, being platform-independent, and portable.
posted by poorlydrawnplato at 3:35 PM on December 25, 2009

Ah, doesn't solve the ipod problem. Disregard.
posted by poorlydrawnplato at 3:37 PM on December 25, 2009

The freeware Sharepod is also a great option, although you may have to install iTunes (I know it is required with an iPhone, not sure about the other iPods). I use it constantly from my laptop - my iPhone is synced to my desktop computer at home, but I want to add podcasts and occasional music tracks to my iPhone from my laptop. This program is lightweight but powerful, and it works wonderfully without worrying about the bloat and sync issues of iTunes. If he has an older iPod, you can run Sharepod directly from the device.
posted by shinynewnick at 7:57 AM on December 26, 2009

Yeah, I don't know about other people, but I've found Sharepod is especially excellent for the one feature, of course, which iTunes stolidly refuses to support: that is, Sharepod is really great for simply dumping the contents of your iPod or iPhone onto your hard drive. It does a lot of other things, but that's what I've used it for, and I've found it's nice because it seems to handle the larger data transfers smoother because it's sort of a different solution for that.

Songbird is nice because it's pretty much a 1:1 replacement of iTunes, offering exactly the same functionality in almost exactly the same way; I haven't used it as much, but I think Sharepod is neat in its own way because it offers an alternative to iTunes that takes a different approach, trimming down certain things which in iTunes are sort of unwieldy and offering features you don't find there as much.
posted by koeselitz at 8:55 AM on December 26, 2009