Its open season on Itunes alternatives and im starting off with a review on a program called CopyTrans Manager which is of course completely free. I do love my ipod, but I truly hate Itunes with a passion and refuse to use it. So obviously its important that I have a full functioning alternative.
CopyTrans manager is a nice light weight bit of software, the inital setup file is 1.1mb (compared to the rather large 80mb Itunes setup file!) When you first load it up your presented with this screen:
You have a number of applications to choose from here, chances are your going to want the top one. The first bit of bad news is that you have to install Itunes to use CopyTrans manager, this is because itunes installs the neccesary drives for your ipod, the good news is that you can uninstall it straight after!
The layout of CopyTrans manager is nice and simple without the bloated feeling of Itunes, at the top you have your Genres, Artists and Albums sections and the main centre section lists all your music when you click on either of those 3 (by default it will list all your ipods music)
Click thumbnail for full size picture
The simplicty of CopyTrans Manager is what makes it so good, at the end of the day most of us just want to stick music on our ipods, we dont want any hassle we just want it to happen quickly and easily, and adding music on using CopyTrans Manager doesnt get much simplier, you simply drag and drop files / folders from you computer to the main copy trans manager window, then simply click update and your done! Simple as pie.
If you want to edit a songs information (title, album, genre, artist etc etc) then simply right click it and chose edit, you will then get the tag editor pop up as follows:
Very straightforward as you can see. You can also create and edit playlists from within CopyTrans Manager, you simply drag and drop your music into the playlist and voila, your done!
It really doesnt get much easier than this, in terms of functionality i’ve pretty much summed up everything that CopyTrans Manager can do, but as I said before this is a no nonsense piece of software that will allow you to add/delete music onto your ipod, nothing more nothing less. If your after bells, whistles and a whole load of other useless stuff that will paralyse your computer then go ahead and use Itunes, if not then give this a try!
You can download CopyTrans Manager from here
