8 Free Tools to Get the Most Out of Your Apple iPod

1. iPod Plug-in for Winamp » The Winamp ipod plugin is a plugin for Winamp that allows you to manage your iPod from within the Winamp media library. It supports all kinds of iPods, from the classic first generation iPods, to the iPod mini, photo, nano and shuffle and everything in between. The current release has the following features - gapless playback for iPod Nano 2G and for transcoded files, automatically eject on Winamp close, sort playlists by clicking on column headers, recover dead iPod even without archive, autofill from chosen playlist, save/restore to/from archive etc. Although Winamp version 5.2 onwards has built-in support for iPod, this software can offer you the features that are missing in Winamp.

2. iPod Audio Converter » It is a universal iPod Audio file converter, which supports popular audio formats : WAV, MP3, Ogg ,9721, Which convert it to iPod Audio format. Some of its features are - Batch Conversion, One click conversion and Conversion of different types of audio files to iPod Audio format.

3. Floola » Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes). It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista. Floola supports all the most common used features including podcasts! Some of its features are - Put the application on iPod and launch it on any PC, add and extract songs to and from iPod, Easily manage, import and export (m3u, pls) playlists, support for Podcasts, Lyric support even on older iPods (3G and above), Search for duplicate songs on iPod, support for artwork and videos, export a list of your iPod files to HTML etc.

4. iPod shuffle Manager » If you are a Windows user tired of having to use iTunes to move tracks to your iPod shuffle, try out this small piece of software. It allows you to use your iPod shuffle like a regular memory stick. You can simply copy your tracks to the iPod shuffle as-is using Windows Explorer (or any other file manager). You may copy files from any computer. Simply run this little utility, which will update the internal database of the iPod shuffle to allow playing the tracks placed on it. Note: This software works only with iPod Shuffle. Also, when you use iPod shuffle Manager with your iPod shuffle, you cannot use iTunes to update its contents.

5. LocalTube » LocalTube is a YouTube downloader that supports video conversion based on the ffmpeg encoder and produces videos playable on video iPods or iRiver h300 series. It also supports iRiver. Simply point to the location of the YouTube video on the Internet and it does the rest. Note: After the conversion is complete, you will have to manually put the video on iPod.

6. TuneSleeve » TuneSleeve software automatically downloads album art from the internet (amazon) and saves it to the iTunes library. It lets you choose which artwork to use from the available results to use in your iTunes library.

7. wmPod » This software lets you manager your iPod from your Windows Media Player. Some of its features are - Manage unlimited playlists and videolists, Queue up Songs and Playlists directly to Windows Media Player, Import/Export MP3 formatted songs, Support for Virtual iPods (vPod) and connect multiple iPods. It supports all the models of iPod including old and latest.

8. iDump » This program will allow you transfer your songs off your iPod to a PC, iDump does come wrapped in installer but you can simply drop the .exe in the root directory on your iPod and run it from there. Connect you iPod and run iDump and you’ll have access to all your songs, select the songs you want to transfer then pick a destination directory and how you would like your songs to be named. Its features are - Output formatting, Unattended Transfer, Search and option to Export Playlists.

Do you use any free iPod software that’s not mentioned here? Please share it with our readers, post your comments. We will be glad to add it to our list in this post.