Tips: iPod Without the iTunes

Like 91% of all hard-disk music player owners, I have an iPod. It took a while -- months really -- to begin to appreciate all the things you can do with it...and play music too. However, iTunes is not the most friendly tool for managing a growing music, especially a large one. For instance, it has limited metadata support, which means you cannot mass tag a sub-directory by genre. And it is slow, even on a recent Pentium 4. This frustration led me to look at alternatives to iTunes for Windows while keeping and expanding the use of my iPod.

This blog is not about all the alternative non-iPod mp3 players, or the many fine software products that do not support iPod. That's for another day.

Player
Nullsoft's Winamp 5.08 is a marvelous, free music player. It has a vibrant user community and a product with lots of plug-in extensions. I like the sound quality on my stereo driven by an AC97-grade PC sound system. However, I chose MediaMonkey, which is built around Winamp but uses the Microsoft Jet database found in MS Access applications. If you have north of 10,000 music tracks, you ought to be thinking about a database and all the database backup activities that go with critical data. You don't want to rate and tag all those songs again in this lifetime, do you?

Winamp and MediaMonkey will play mp3s and Windows WMA songs. They will also play some Apple iTunes mp4 files. However, you should go here and get the in_m4a.zip file, which should be installed in the Plugins sub-directory of Winamp or MusicMonkey. This plug in allows the Winamp and MediaMonkey players to manage and play Apple m4A lossless recordings (see below).

CD Ripping -- Use iTunes and Apple Lossless MP4 (.m4a)
Everybody has a CD ripper: iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, MediaMonkey, Nero, the list goes on. After evolving my thinking -- whole disk drived prices have plummetted -- I concluded the only way to go is to rip CDs with a lossless codec. The reason is that you only want to rip your CDs once, even if technology changes down the road. With mp3s, you are losing sound quality with the mp3 "lossy" compression. A lossless codec takes up more space than an mp3 but does not lose any sound quality in the process. You can Google the subject and be into the bits immediately, or read this article which sums things up. My conclusion is that while Apple has a proprietary lossless codec, it's not a bad one and it sure as heck works with iPod. And I ought to be able to convert form Apple's lossless .m4a format to something else down the road without losing sound quality.

In short, the plan going forward is to rip CDs with iTunes using , then import the tags into the MediaMonkey database, which is about a two-click process. In iTunes, choose Edit/Preferences/Importing and set Import Using to Apple Lossless Encoder. That's it.

Playlists
Use your preferred player, Winamp or MediaMonkey to manage your playlists as .m3u files. Then File/Import the playlists into iTunes. Alternatively, see Ephpod below. Or you can drop tunes directly into your iPod from the player if you have configured Windows to recognize your iPod as a disk. (In which case, you can even defrag your iPod :-)

Metadata Tags: Your Data, Your Way
Sooner or later, depending on how anal you are and how big your collection of tunes gets, you'll want to do some serious tagging. Adding album, date, and genre information, for instance, to keep track of the dozens of versions of "Hey, Joe" on your hard drive. Players have crude tools for doing this, even iTunes. But if your music is spread across lots of directories, you have lots of it, you rip Internet radio streams, or time is precious, you'll want to get a software application that specializes in "mp3 tagging".

I downloaded and tried several. The one I close is mp3 tag studio.

Ephpod, the non-iTunes
Ephpod (pronounced Eef-pod) is a Windows applet that substitutes for the iPod synchronization functions of iTunes. It's free, and for some, allows one to cut the ties to iTunes completely.

Filling Your iPod
Got an iPod and a collection of six CDs? No, don't go to some peer-peer network, get infected with spyware, and end up with a subpoena. Do it legally. Rip Internet radio stations into mp3 files, and you can fill that iPod with the genres of your choice in just a few weeks. First, get familiar with Internet radio at Shoutcast. There are thousands of Internet radio stations playing 24/7. Listen in as free background music. To capture Shoutcast radio, you need an Internet radio recorder application. I like StationRipper. You can capture multiple, simultaneous streams with a broadband connection. Songs get dropped into a separate directory for each radio station, which is helpful because while you can use the mp3s in your player and iPod immediately, I recommend you use the mp3 tagger to extract the artist, title, album, and your choice of genre, and write the mp3 file name and the internal metadata tags consistently.

I find that an Internet radio station has a useful ripping life of 1-2 weeks before the playlist just repeats itself. Some stations are different, but I have never found one that played a new tune every three minutes without repeats! But do the math: at four minutes a song, you'll rip 360 songs a day per stream. By carefully selecting the stations to your music tastes, you can fill that iPod in a month.

I recommend choosing stations that broadcast at 128 kb for MP3s. The quality is noticably better, particularly if you are a finicky listener or plan to crank the tunes up on a stereo. Note that 128 kb WMA streams will have better quality than mp3 at the same rate, but you'll have to import the .wma files into iTunes before they can be downloaded to your iPod (unless you use Winamp, MediaMonkey, or Ephpod to manage your iPod). That said, I have had good experiences with 96 kb MP3s at ClassicalJunk, a light classics station.

Automatic Tagging
MoreTunes is a program that goes out to the web and grabs metadata for tracks playing on Winamp, MediaMonkey and some other players. If you have a bunch of mp3s with just artist-title info, this program can easily allow you to update and expand your metadata while you're listening to music on your PC and reading the Sunday paper. I find MoreTunes is fast, caches its data well, and makes a choice. Other taggers such as MusicBrainz require more work to ferret out the album info.

MP3-Tag Studio provides another useful function: track trimming. Some streaming stations add a few seconds of promo or DJ lead-in to a song. That gets included in the recorded .mp3 file. MP3-Tag Studio can trim off those added seconds with a couple of clicks.

Peter S. Kastner