I've noticed timsamoff and Totololo saying they use iTunes. I'm totally unfamiliar, and not inclined to learn much about it.

But I'm thinking of buying an MP3 player for a teenage son of a friend. He's had two iPods stolen, and I'm not into spending the big Apple bucks. Since all his music is in iTunes (on a Windows PC), is it going to be a big pain for him to get it into a non-iPod, like this good-looking deal on the Dane-Elec Meizu? He isn't a computer idiot, but he isn't a geek and he's not a patient person either. Is there some program that makes it simple? I'm willing to learn some to help him, but I'm not that big a music buff and I've never even made playlists. (I'm happy with Vagalume and CDs or whole ripped CD's.)

Here's a sample of what worries me, and a response. (That response is not heartening enough, btw.)

I know this is way off-topic; but that's why it's in the off-topic category.

As you maybe know, iTunes is a user-friendly database : you feed it with all your music and it organize and manage it for you. It's very efficient but many people doesn't like a software that manages their files in its own way ...

If this kid is used to iTunes, he will loose a lot of user friendlyness ... The good new is that he can probably just take the album folders in iTunes music folders on his PC and copy it to the media player. If this player is AAC compatible, it should play the music without any problem. But it will probably not show the cover or the lyrics, and maybe it will not organize the tracks properly ...

Maybe you should search internet for real life tests of people who used a player with iTunes.

forgive me for a more personnal statement, but if he was stolen twice his player, I believe there is a lot more important problem to solve than the device replacement ...

It's not hard at all.

I use iTunes for my iPhone; however I own a Zune. iTunes will collect your music and arrange them into folders. And for a drag-and-drop enabled player, you can just drop the folders down to the player.

In my case, I use the Zune software, pointed it to the iTunes library and that's how I sync an iTunes library to a non-iTunes enabled player.

Hey, it's OK, we're in the off-topic arena!

Actually, I think it may be three times! (Though I think that includes simple misplacement.) And there are more important problems than the repeated theft of his iPod, too. He's a good kid, so's his mom, they're working on it, but we just aren't all born the same. There but for the grace of God (so to speak), go I.

Thanks, I'll give that a try with my Cowon iAudio and a friend's iTunes. I had thought it might be harder since I've tried to get stuff like an eBook file out of iTunes and it seemed to me there wasn't anything findable through the traditional (that is, non-iTunes) file manager. I couldn't find the file, let alone use it elsewhere. But maybe I just didn't know what I was doing. (In fact, I didn't. But it still seemed I should have been able to find it, as an adept computer user, and couldn't.)

Get an previous gen iPod. Much cheaper and will work with iTunes.

I agree with Thesandlord : even a second hand ipod could be a good option, especially if you have to replace it after some monthes ...

Probably the most sensible solution. Thanks. (I hate supporting what I think of as an ultra-closed system, but you're probably right. It's not like I'd be murdering someone, just buying an iPod. )

But if anyone else has info to add on getting music and other files out of an iPod, I'd be curious.

(A little later ... ) In light of Gerbick's post about moving iTunes songs to his Zune, and Totololo's comment about AAC-compatibility, I looked at NewEgg's mp3 players with a filter for only AAC-format-playing units ... They list 79 units, but only 3 units under $100 played AAC, and two of those were recertified Zunes.

Then I looked at making iTunes play nice with other mp3 players. And it looks like a pain. There's iTunes Agent and BadApple, maybe others. For me, I'd do it. But an impatient teenager isn't going to. Besides, it looks like if you really want to go that route, your life would be a lot easier if you had iTunes encoding as mp3 to begin with; I'm sure he did what Apple makes easy, used AAC. Finally, it appears that the only way to get an iTunes-store-purchased song to play on a non-iPod (or non-AAC) player is to first burn it to CD, or use software that makes your hard drive emulate a CD disk (like NoteBurner). What a pain.

This bit of research confirms what I had to say in my posts about why I can't recommend a NIT to my friend and how Nokia and all the other non-Apple companies in this space are really starting out from way behind. I think I won't get the kid any MP3 player at all and use the money to buy him a share of Apple stock!

There is that one app Gizmodo was talking about, you know the one that advertised in front of the apple store. But seriously, if you are organizing your music with iTunes, it will be in a nice directory structure. Then just import it into Winamp, which has sync for PlaysForSure, iPod, and USB mass storage.

(Personally I just SFTP my files onto my tablet. Wireless sync FTW)

Haha, don't over react !

Itunes semi closed attitude is not so bad after all, at least, the software is very good and more permissive than any other legal&DRMized platform ...