iTunes is an excellent way to keep your music library organized and has one of the most popular digital music stores built in, but if you have an MP3 player that isn’t an iPod, you’re stuck managing its contents outside of iTunes, until now.  I’ve identified some tools that can help you bridge that gap.

Note that not all digital audio players are capable of playing every audio format.  They can all play MP3, but there are some that cannot play the AAC format that Apple prefers, and only iPods can play tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store that have DRM.  Happily, Apple no longer protects downloads from the iTunes Music Store with DRM and provides a way to remove DRM from tracks you may have purchased prior to that change.  With those caveats in mind, read on.

If you use iTunes on a Mac, and if your player appears as a storage device in the Finder when you connect it, you could use the Sync Playlist Files to Folder script I found on Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes.  From the site: “This script will copy the files of the tracks of a particular playlist to a designated folder; on subsequent runs it will update the folder’s contents to mirror the file tracks which have been added or removed from the playlist.”  That sounds like it will do the trick.  The script requires that you edit it to specify where it will place the tracks in the playlist, but comes with complete installation and configuration instructions in its ReadMe file.  Specify the filesystem location of your player (something like /Volumes/your mp3 player/), and it will sync directly into the device.

For Windows users of iTunes, this article describes two free applications that allow you to sync with any MP3 player (I found this article via J.M.A. Daily).  Both iTunes Agent, an open source utility, and iTunes Sync, a proprietary but also free program, have GUI configuration and are driven from the Windows System Tray.  Both of these applications work with iTunes 8, and they both require .NET Framework 2.0 which is available in Microsoft Windows Update and which you may already have installed on your computer.

If you already use another method to sync your non-iPod music player with iTunes on Windows or the Mac, let us know in the comments.

Tagged as: itunes, mac, windows