How to free your Ipod - An alternative to Itunes for Ipod Nano g6

Last year I bought an Ipod Nano g6 and suddenly found I had no choice but to use Itunes for loading my songs! Before this I was using floola to manage the song on my Ipod nano g5 but unfotunately the folks at floola have yet to provide support for the Nano Gen 6. So for the last year I have been putting up with Itunes annoying interface, constant useless updates, and overall inability to correctly display the data from many of my mp3s.

A month ago I bought a new hard drive for my laptop and had to re-install all my software including the newest version Itunes. From that point I started getting constant errors in Itunes and Windows 7 could simply not install the Apple Mobile Device USB Driver correctly.

After running through all the steps on the Apple help page and reinstalling Itunes more times than i can remember I kind of gave up on my Ipod for a little while. I then decided it was time to divorce itunes once and for all find a better way to manage my songs, someway, somehow. So here are the steps I took.

1. Getting windows to recognize my Ipod and install the Apple Mobile Device USB Driver.

After having no luck with any of the newer versions of Itunes and serched through my old files to find a copy of Itunes ... 32bit. Since I am running windows seven 64 bit now I did not think this would work but to my surprise it helped more than I could imagine! After install an error message came up saying Itunes could no run properly but when I plugged my Ipod in windows found it instantly and the USB driver wan installed and working perfectly!

So now my computer could recognize my ipod again but i had a faulty 32bit version itunes that was practically useless..

2. Itunes replacement.

After a quick search for Itunes alternative I found Media monkey has support for Nano 6g, hooray!! So a quick download and install later I could view my ipod in media monkey.
However as I had experienced with a previous attempt to use Media Monkey could not edit or delete songs from my ipod. However I could copy songs to my ipod... so i had a feeling i was on the right track.

After exploring the hidden file system on my ipod (see here for showing hidden folders in windows 7) I found that the songs loaded my Media Monkey were retained there file names and could be played right along side all the files with the random files names from itunes. If you have ever looked in your Itunes library you know what i mean (XY02.mp3 GH07.mp3 etc, etc!)

Now I knew i was onto something!

With this revelation I knew it was time to remove everything related to Apple and itunes from my computer except for the bare essentials alowing windows to recognize my ipod.

3. Removing Apple

I uninstalled anything that I though may not directly effect windows recognizing my Ipod:

Itunes
apple software update
quicktime

leaving behind only:

bounjour
Apple Application support

So I now had a relatively apple free computer but my Ipod was still infected with the Itunes filing system.

I recklossly deleted the Itunes folder and all mp3s from my ipod, crossing my finger it would still work...

I then opened media monkey to find an empty Ipod which I could freely copy songs to, edit and delete. Not only that but they all retained there orginal file names and were not rearranged into some insane filing system which replaces file names with random letters and numbers!

Me and my Ipod are free at last from the tyranny of Itunes! :D