**Updated, with image, on popular demand**
When it comes to managing my iPod, I find iTunes extremely annoying. After plenty of trial and error (including more than one case of accidental iPod wiping), Floola iPod has emerged as a favourite, making it this week’s Saturday Night Freeware.
Floola is available in two flavours — Floola iPod and Floola Desktop, the former being a portable application you can run off your iPod itself. Clever, huh? I use the Mac OS version, but it is available for Windows and Linux as well. You can add and manage music, photos, videos, podcasts, artwork and more using Floola. It also supports Smart Playlists, Lyrics and Notes, and Growl (Mac) and Snarl (Windows) notifications.
You can search for duplicate media, organise playlists, fix your iPod, search for lost files and even convert media formats with Floola. Apparently you can also use it to keep Google Calendars synced (haven’t tried this). It also supports Last.fm and adding videos from YouTube, etc. by just copying the page URL (haven’t tried these either).
Make no mistake, Floola isn’t perfect. It’s buggy, sometimes slow. However, it works just fine to manage my music since my demands are fairly modest. It also deleted everything from my iPod once on the pretext of clearing out orphan items. There is a nag screen to donate, which you can’t close till the timer runs down to zero. However, I love the portability and the elimination of iTunes from my life.
A big thank you to Tomas Camin for Floola. One hopes it will see improvements in the near future.
No picture! There needs to be a picture *nods* It sounds very very clever and all but how can you really tell if there isn’t picture proof? :p
There you go!
Yay! So much better 🙂