03.10.14 - never mind, then

I'm dropping PodMonkey—I've seen too many reports of it rendering iPods useless. I have no idea what the problem is, all I know is it works for me on my trusty 5 gig (firmware v1.3) and on the 30 gig (firmware v2.0.1) I borrowed for testing.. I've left the source link up in case anyone want to play around with the code.

03.10.13 - v1.1.1

Looks like PodMonkey couldn't deal with disabled items in playlists, either. Thanks to those who sent me crash reports..

03.10.12 - v1.1

I fixed the bug that was causing PodMonkey to crash on pretty much every machine but mine. Turns out it couldn't read playlists as iTunes writes them, but since I hadn't used iTunes in, like, forever, I didn't notice. Hooray for testing!

Manage your iPod with the Finder!

The first time you run PodMonkey it moves all of your music files out of the iPod's hidden folder, out to where you can get at them. When you make changes—copy files in, move them around, delete them—just run PodMonkey again to synchronize your iPod to the Finder: your MP3 files appear on your iPod, more or less as if you'd imported them with a certain iApp that I can't stand but everyone else seems to love..

Playlists, too!

PodMonkey also supports playlists, albeit in a somewhat obtuse manner: playlists are represented as folders inside a top-level "Playlist" folder on your iPod. Each playlist folder contains finder aliases to your music files (inside the "Music" folder). Just command-option drag music files into your playlist folder, number the aliases if you want to change the playlist order, and run PodMonkey again to update the playlists on your iPod.

M4A/M4P support? Well, sorta..

It does seem to work if you first copy the file over with iTunes—looks like there's a hidden authorization bit that gets set somewhere outside the iTunesDB file. Weird. Since I don't know what the guts of the mp4 format look like, I'm just assuming a 128k bitrate and dividing the filesize to get the playtime, without which the iPod refuses to play the track. Good enough for Music Store tracks..

Also, it seems that whatever authentication iTunes does to your iPod for M4P files seems to last after PodMonkey moves the file. So if you buy something from the music store, just copy it over to your pod, run PodMonkey, and you're mint, baby.

No worky with iTunes linked playlists!

If you want to give PodMonkey a try but you plan on running iTunes at any point in the future, set your iTunes iPod prefs to "Manually manage songs and playlists". Otherwise, iTunes may try and copy some of your files (though not all, strangely enough) back into the hidden folder next time you run it, wasting disk space—maybe not a problem on your shiny new 40 Gig iPod, but it is on my "classic" pod.

Download the source?

Sure, go ahead! It's covered by the GPL—that means you can do anything you want with it as long as you make your changes available to the world and give me credit where it's due. (If you fix a bug, could you send me a copy?) It also means I'm not responsible for anything bad this thing does to your iPod. Remember, the programs's digging around in the guts of your precious little pod there, and you really don't know what it's doing until you read the source code. Go ahead! I dare you!

If something does go wrong..

Email me and we'll get it fixed.

Any questions? Or suggestions?

Just email me. I might even write back!