Shuffle without iTunes

I bought an iPod Shuffle some time in July 2005 and was immediately annoyed because it worked only with iTunes. In my opinion, the sanest way to download content to a USB attached audio player is to make the device available as a USB Mass Storage Device and just copy files to it as you would on a USB memory stick. Salvation was not far away...

Googlemancy revealed that Martin Fiedler's shuffle-db Python script would allow me to dispense with iTunes entirely. The only shortfall with shuffle-db was that it required your computer to have Python installed. While most Linuxen come with Python, Windows boxes typically don't. I used the excellent py2exe extension and compiled shuffle-db script into standalone executables, shuffle-db-0.7-pre1.zip and shuffle-db-1.0-rc1-winxp.zip are both available. The 0.7-pre1 release should work on Win2k/XPwhile the 1.0-rc1 release has been tested on WinXP SP2 only.

If you have iTunes, this is good time to uninstall it. Plug in your Shuffle and it should appear as a regular USB Removable Storage Device. If your Shuffle is unused, you need to initialize it correctly before proceeding. The "Usage" section of the shuffle-db website has details.

Unzip the files into the root directory of your Shuffle. My Shuffle is mounted as the F: and this may be different on your box, so ensure that the runme shortcut points to rebuild_db.exe.

If you are on a non-Windows platform and have Python installed, you can still use shuffle-db, by running python rebuild_db.py.

Copy/delete mp3 files to/from any folder on the Shuffle. Before disconnecting the Shuffle from your computer, double click the runme shortcut. This runs rebuild_db.exe and recreates the necessary index. That's all there is to it!

Note that shuffle-db silently ignores non audio files, and the iPod can be used as a USB memory stick as well.