Chaos Laboratory

If you’re an iPod owner and use it in conjunction with iTunes, you’d have surely been frustrated at not being able to copy music from iPod back to the PC. When you transfer media files to iPod they’re stored in a custom compressed format and all the files are renamed. Even if you browse the iPod folders using your File Manager, you’ve no clue as to which file represents which track. Moreover, whenever you needed to manage your iPod you’ve to install iTunes or some other iPod management software.

SharePod gives you a nice break from all those problems. Not only it allows you to copy music back from the iPod, it offers a horde of cool features.

First & foremost, SharePod doesn’t need to be installed anywhere. It consists of a couple of files and can reside on your iPod enabling you to plug it in to the USB port of any computer and manage your music collection.

Here’s a list of features from the SharePod site …

• Copy songs and playlists from your iPod to your PC
• Copy songs from a PC to your iPod – you don’t need iTunes to add music to your iPod anymore!
• Completely customizable organization of copied files – choose your own folder and filename structure
• Integration with iTunes – once you have copied music to your PC, easily add it to your iTunes library
• Built-in Media Player
• Search by Title, Artist, Album, Genre (or any combination)
• Create Winamp-style playlists from the music on your iPod so you can listen to it without needing to copy the mp3 files to your computer.
• iPod Network File Sharing – If you are on a network, (e.g. at work/university) and you enable the feature, other users can run your copy of SharePod from their own computers, and download music directly from your iPod!
• No messy install/uninstall process – SharePod is just a couple of files

The software is in version 2.1 now and the author keeps updating it from time to time – although not very frequently. Depending on your Windows installation, it might require a couple of old OCX runtime libraries which can be downloaded from the SharePod site itself.

The interface is really simple making the software very easy to operate, even for beginners.

Here’s a screenshot:

All in all this is an excellent tool for all iPod users. Get SharePod.