iPod Shuffle without iTunes

The Hubby surprised me with a wonderful treat the other day: an iPod Shuffle. Cute little thing, metallic lime square made to clip on your clothes unobtrusively and deliver audio-yumminess directly in your ear. YES.

So I settled down next to the laptop to make it go. We have a thing against iTunes in our household, so the search began: how to set the thing up to play music without iTunes.

It was actually pretty easy once I found the right pieces. Here's what's worked for me (for anyone interested):

• the script below requires Python, so download and install that first
• then run rebuild_db

The instructions on the rebuild_db page made it smooth as cheesecake. Except that I missed one little detail the first time around. When they say "initialize your iPod with iTunes (that is, give it a name, and enable its usage as a mass storage device)", I missed the part about enable it as an MSD. Which led me along the following rabbit trail:

I gave it a name, but then I couldn't access it via drive letter. It wouldn't show up in an explorer window for me to copy files.

The iTunes interface is highly self-serving, which makes it bad interface design, imho. They push a lot of propaganda at you, so once in the main window for my device, I had to click 2-3 buttons to say "No, I don't want to register" and then "Cancel" JUST to reach the normal view of my iPod contents. It's the sort of grief that pushes folks to give up their privacy to registration just to shut the thing up. Anyway...

Once there, you click the tab at the top for Settings. Towards the bottom is the checkbox for "Enable disk use".

Side note: I'm not sure about the songs vs. data slider bar. It seems logical to me that you'd want to give it more room for data, since iTunes probably only counts "songs" as songs that it is managing. So that's what I did -- set the slider for more data and only left room for about 10 songs to iTunes (just in case I ever find a CD in iTunes format that I really want and don't have time to convert it before sticking it on the iPod). If anyone knows better about the data vs. songs, let me know; it's just a guess on my part.

This all did the trick, and I was able to copy my .mp3 files onto the iPod and they played perfectly. Awesome.

Another nice feature: the rebuild_db "smart shuffle" feature (part of the script by default in recent versions) is a better random than the default shuffle. Have you ever been annoyed by "random shuffles" that keep hitting the same song or album, or don't ever seem to hit others? This one is better!

A little more tweaking of the Python script (they have some sweet little options for folks that like to listen to audio books or lectures), and everything is now just the way I like it.

Beautiful.

It's stuff like this that keeps me saying, "Ah, technology" (to the tune of "Ah, amore!").

What cool little tech hacks have made your life more enjoyable lately?