MY IPOD assumed another mission when I started using it as a drag-and-drop device. It still plays music as good as any MP3 device but knowing it's there with gigs of other stuff makes it more useful than a dumb music player.
For nearly a year, I used XPlay 2 from MediaFour when transferring MP3 files from intranet drives, removeable gigs of storage and even from mapped FTP locations. If Windows Explorer could see the space, XPlay 2 could drag-and-drop into it.
Two other things XPlay 2 did for me:
- Maintained playlist, artist and album affiliations. This meant the iPod cued up music, spoken snippets, stings and credits for our podcasts in Tipperary Institute.
- XPlay 2 stopped and undocked the iPod more efficiently than any other software on my XP Pro operating system.
During months of usage, XPlay 2 demanded more of my system overhead than I wanted to give it. I watched CPU cycles through a system tray utility and after a while, it was obvious that XPlay was making Windows Explorer use more processing power than it did before installing XPlay 2. I never froze my system but my system noticeably slowed down. After months of hard use, I heartily recommended XPlay 2 for drag-and-drop operations on the iPod. I amended that recommendation by later mentioning that XPlay should not be used if you're running a processor slower than 1 GHz in speed.
Today, I use Anapod Explorer instead of XPlay 2. I still have drag-and-drop but with much less overhead on my system.
Image of my iPod snapped with Fuji S602Z. Thanks, Tim!
