I was syncing my iPod when the electricity went out last weekend. I somehow ended up with duplicates for every song, which was not good. I managed to purge everything and was attempting to re-sync, when Songbird suddenly started crashing because it didn’t have enough virtual memory.
I assumed that the power outage damaged some of my RAM, or part of my hard drive, so I increased the size of my swap file, but that didn’t help. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Songbird, but that didn’t work, either. I tried installing it on another partition, then on an entirely different drive. No go. If the problem is damage to my system, it seems to only have affected Songbird, which would be weird, but not beyond the realm of possibility.
Anyway, after pulling my hair out, I looked around for another iTunes alternative, found CopyTrans Manager, and gave it a try. Wow! It’s much zippier than Songbird. You can also add and remove files directly to and from your iPod, instead of having to re-mount and re-sync the device. Updates that would have taken hours with Songbird can be done in minutes with CopyTrans Manager.
The downsides are that it cannot edit metadata, so if you want to alter any tags, you’ll have to do so using another program. Since I’m using something else to rip and organize my library, that’s no problem for me. You also cannot add tracks at the folder level, which makes importing tracks into the CopyTrans Manager library tedious.
It also does not (yet) have drivers for iPod Touch or the iPhone, so if you have those, you’d still have to install iTunes to get device drivers. It supports all other flavors of iPod, though, including the Classic.
Like I said, it’s zippy, and so far, it’s rock solid on my quirky system. Yay!
red paper boat 