I am a first time user of the 'i' family {ipod, iphone, itunes}. I own an iphone. Before iphone, I used other phones like Sony Erricson W800 and Nokia N80. One of the most common requirement is to store music on the phone. In those phones, it used to be straight forward. You just create folders/sub-folders and dump the music files there. The phone also carries the same concept of folder that we have on the PC. Once I add music to phone I can delete from my PC. I can delete music from my mobile whenever I wanted to do it.
When I came to iphone+itunes, its a new world for me. First of all there is no concept of folder in iphone and for that matter an ipod also. Apple might have thought that all its users are dumb asses who do not understand the concept of a folder. Next thing is the synching part. First you have to add it into itunes, organize in it and then sync it to the iphone/ipod. If there are music files in iphone and they are not present in itunes list, they will get deleted from iphone on sync. All the music files should have proper ID3 tags to be arranged according to albums. I can keep talking about many such nuances. In short, I hate itunes.
While I was looking for alternatives, I came across Sharepod. It is an alternative to the iTunes to load music files into iphone/ipod. Yes, you can put music into iphone also. Though it does not solve all the problems that I was talking about, it alleviates some of the problems. It has some nice features like dragging files from explorer and put in iphone, add and remove music from iphone etc.
But do not jump out of your chair yet. It has some problems too. First of all it does not have all the functionality of itunes. Say for e.g. podcast synching. So, if you are the type of person who want both music and podcasts, I guess sharepod is not for you. The problem is that if you add music with sharepod and try to synch podcasts with itunes, itunes will delete the files added from sharepod because the music is not in itunes list. I am a victim to this problem myself. I do not know a solution to this. Any help is appreciated.
