Winston Lawrence

Project Manager & Occasional developer

Review: Sharepod

Manage your iPod Touch music

Features

  • Add & remove music and videos from your iPod and iPod Touch
  • Copy music, videos and playlists from the iPod and iPod Touch to your PC
  • Import music and videos (including ratings) back into your iTunes library.

Description

Apple made it pretty easy to get audio and video onto the iPod platform but they deliberately made it difficult to go in the other direction. Normally when you are using Itunes to manage your library and iPod this isn't a problem because all of your information is in the Itunes database on your computer. If you've used Itunes for awhile you will notice eventually that some music tracks have an "!" next to them and this can mean problems. Essentially Itunes has a record for this item but it can no longer find it on your computer.  This mean that the track or tracks are on your iPod but no longer on your computer and Apple does not allow you to copy the tracks from your iPod back to your computer.


This just happened to me with several old Dinah Washington Albums that I had transcoded onto my iPod Touch. For some reason they were gone from my computer. I certainly didn't feel like spending several hours re-transcoding them again, from turntable to PC to iPod. It actually took awhile on Google to find something useful that didn't cost money. Eventually though, I ran across Sharepod which just plain worked.

SharePod is free - it can be used on your iPod or iPod Touch for free and for as long as you like. Essentially, once you plug in your iPod into the USB connection, it gives you an Explorer like view of the files saved. You can then drag and drop files from the iPod to the PC. Just to repeat ths app works with the iPod Touch - there are some older apps like Yamipod that work well with iPods but do not work with the iPod Touch. If you don't want to bother with iTunes for any number of reasons, then you could also user Sharepod to manage your music (and video) on the device.

Specifications

  • Version:    3.9.5    
  • License:    Freeware
  • System:    Windows XP/Vista/Vista x64/2000/98, iPod

ScreenShots

Winston Lawrence

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