We all love the iPod, but not all of us love iTunes. Dont get me wrong, iTunes is a great piece of software, but it has just too many limitations.  Today im going to show you how to free yourself from the one computer one iPod nonsense.  Upload music from ANY computer without synchronising the whole music library, and even more importantly copy music from your iPod to any computer,sounds great? then lets get to it.

What you need

first thing, enable your iPod as a portable drive. If thats done, then you are good to go.

below are a list of some of my favorite softwares to do this. Some might not be as good as the iTunes, but they definately give you the freedom to use your ipod anywhere.

Floola: Floola is a freeware, cross platform application that lets you copy music and videos to and from your iPod from and to any computer.

Floola is actually capable of doing a lot more – like managing your music, playlists, and artwork, finding and removing duplicate songs, integrating with Last.fm, and playing your iPod’s music on a computer- but that’s not what we’re most concerned with here.

The important thing is that with Floola you can add music and videos to your iPod from any  computer, all it takes is a simply drag and drop.

Media Monkey

MediaMonkey is a heavy-duty, fully-featured media player for Windows. It is just like iTunes in Mac, allowing you to manage your music, video, podcast, rip CD, organize album art etc. In their latest version 3 release, they implemented iPhone/iPod Touch support and you can now transfer/sync your music easily.

In order to use Media Monkey to manage your iPhone music, you have to first install iTunes (version 8.1.0.52 and before). That could be ironical since the purpose of it all is to do without iTunes completely. However, iTunes comes with the device driver for iPhone/iPod Touch that is required by many third-party media players to detect and access the database of the iPhone. As soon as you install iTunes, you will be able to use Media Monkey to sync your music.

For those who don’t want to install iTunes, there is a hack:

1. Download the iTunes.exe file
2. Rename the .exe to .zip
3. Open up the zipped file and extract AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi and QuickTime.msi
4. Install these two files.

You can then sync your iPhone with Media Monkey without iTunes.

Winamp and the ml_ipod plugin (Windows)

For those who have been using Winamp since the first day it was launched, there is no need to migrate all your music library to iTunes just because you bought a iPhone. With the ml_ipod plugin, you will be able to sync your music.

Firstly, you have to install iTunes (ml_ipod was tested with iTunes 7.4.2 and 8.0.2. If you are using a later version of iTunes, might not work), or use the above hack to install the driver without installing iTunes.

Secondly, install Winamp (recommended version 5 and above), follow by ml_ipod (version 3.08 or later). Plug in your iPhone and start Winamp. You should be able to see the device appear on the left side of the panel (see above screenshot).

One good thing about using this combination is, unlike iTunes, this is a bidirectional sync – you can download the songs back to your computer.

3) SharePod (Windows)

If you are looking for a simple and lightweight software to get the synchronization done quickly and easily, then Sharepod would be a good choice.

Sharepod is nothing more than a software for you to sync your iPod and iPhone. While you can play music directly from your iPhone within Sharepod, the music player is only minimal and does not offer much options.

t offer much options.

SharePod also offers bidirectional synchronization between your iPhone and computer. Did I also mention that there is no installation required for Sharepod? It just works!

Just like the above two softwares, you’ll need to install iTunes (or perform the hack) for SharePod to recognize your iPhone.

CopyTransManager

This is my all time favourite, copy trans does just about everything your iTunes can, without the baggage..

Unlike all other software listed above, you don’t need to install iTunes to use CopyTrans Manager. It claims to be the alternative to iTunes. Perhaps in the field of syncing your music library, it can be a good alternative. Other than that, it is clearly lacking in features and does not offer as many features as iTunes.