iPod Tools

[stray kitten]

Was browsing through the utils thread and didn't find anything.

I am looking at iPod tools and there are alot of them. What I want:

fix library duplicates (must)
ring tones (nice)
burning made easier (nice)
album art made easier (nice)

Moved the iPods around many times and imported many things from various sources, and the old library needs some work. There must be some iPod gods out there who max this thing?

So far I looked at

Tune tools
PodMaxx
Roxio Music Lab

Tune Tools claims alot and they have about a dozen different versions on Amazon. Could anyone take the time to post their own tools that work for them?

[GenghisTron]

I'm not sure what you mean by ring tones, but I personally use Helium Music Manager. It's not specifically for iPods in any way, but the things you listed above that you wanted are integrated into the program. It is very easy to get album art with HMM, it automatically downloads relevant album art from Amazon.com so you don't have to manually do it, and if the automatic way doesn't work, you can do it manually if you so chose. The duplicates thing is easily solved with HMM, there are 'actions' you can perform with HMM, which are like scripts. You can completely customize the actions or use the default ones.

As for burning, I'm assuming you mean burning CD's? I've never used HMM to burn CD's, but I know it's integrated, so I can't really say much about that.

As for managing your iPod, I really like it a lot more compared to iTunes, but it's not perfect.

[mervaka]

a hammer. complements the iNail app

[stray kitten]

Originally Posted by GenghisTron

I'm not sure what you mean by ring tones, but I personally use Helium Music Manager. It's not specifically for iPods in any way, but the things you listed above that you wanted are integrated into the program. It is very easy to get album art with HMM, it automatically downloads relevant album art from Amazon.com so you don't have to manually do it, and if the automatic way doesn't work, you can do it manually if you so chose. The duplicates thing is easily solved with HMM, there are 'actions' you can perform with HMM, which are like scripts. You can completely customize the actions or use the default ones.

As for burning, I'm assuming you mean burning CD's? I've never used HMM to burn CD's, but I know it's integrated, so I can't really say much about that.

As for managing your iPod, I really like it a lot more compared to iTunes, but it's not perfect.

Thanks for the info. By ring tones I mean creating phone ring tones for the major smart phone OS's. And there are a couple of packages that make burning faster and easier. For example Music Lab will let you start a rip session and you just feed cds in one at a time and you can use all your cd-rom drive in parallel. I ran into a large cache of cds recently and figure some cash is worth the time saved. Never heard of Helium so I am checking it out.

Originally Posted by mervaka

a hammer. complements the iNail app

iRate?

[stray kitten]

The latest version of iTunes will let you hold shift, then while holding shift you can select show exact duplicates. It took me about 2 hours to delete 6000 duplicate songs, but I made sure each played. I could never decide on the tools I wanted to spend money on. Rarely did anyone get a good review.

One tool I did find that is FREE and pretty cool is Yamipod. (will link in software sticky) If I was the only one using iTunes I would use it exclusively and day F iTunes.