Divorce! iPod and iTunes Rendered Asunder!
"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

Q: "What's the between God and Steve Jobs?"
A: "God doesn't think he's Steve Jobs."

Nor does God do MacWorld presentations, for that matter.

What Jobs hath joined together (iPod & iTunes), others have rendered asunder - that's right, folks, it *is* possible to use an iPod WITHOUT iTunes.

Some might ask, "Why would anyone not want to use iTunes?"

Now there are lots of good reasons why a person might not want to install or use iTunes. It doesn't let you get music OFF your iPod onto another computer, it hogs resources and leaves services running in the background and worst of all, it doesn't play FLAC files.

But all that doesn't matter. The real question is, "Why should anyone be forced to use iTunes with an iPod if they don't want to?"

As it turns out, you can, indeed, divorce the iPod from iTunes.

Wired News has a list (titled, funnily enough, "Rescue Your Stranded Tunes"), and my favourite picks are:

Yamipod (review)
Anapod (review) &
Winamp iPod Plugin

The Winamp iPod plugin is what I'm using now, and it works perfectly.

Winamp is an old favourite of mine, and it plays FLAC, Monkey's Audio, OGG and any other DRM-free music format of your choice, lossless or otherwise. The iPod plugin  promises to eventually even transcode unsupported audio formats (like FLAC) into MP3 when you transfer them over to your iPod - automagically.

I'm all for choice, so if iTunes works for you, great. For all you malcontents out there - start your divorce proceedings!