Ive said it before, I really hate the iTunes software. Ive stayed away from iPods since they were introduced years ago, not because of the software (I didn’t know how bad it was) but because I didn’t want my music to be locked down to one player. Ive had the iPhone now for about a year and a half and have installed iTunes on several machines, through several versions of Windows and each time I would say that iTunes is virus-like with its bugginess.

Right now, Ive been using my Media center PC to sync my phone, well up till a few days ago. I finally got tired of Itunes and decided to check out other options as far as syncing my media with my iPhone. Luckily there are other options and I’m going to let you know about 1 I tried out.

Media Monkey isn’t really new to music management but it has recently added support for the iPhone and iPod touch. The good thing about Media Monkey is that you could possibly get by without having itunes installed at all.

As far as using it with the iPhone. You can synce your music, along with your playlist (there is a shuffle option). You can also search for, manage and sync your Podcast. All without using iTunes. I kept itunes installed but removes all the settings that allows iTunes to start with windows, or when a iPod is plugged in. Then I installed Media Monkey and plugged in my iPhone. I went through all of the settings, which more detail on configuring an iPod (or iPhone) can be found here. and everything was set up. took less than 10 minutes.

The Time consumption came when I went to sync all of my Podcast. MM (MM = Media Monkey) easily brought over all my music and playlist when I imported the iTunes music folder to MM, It also imported all of the podcast. The problem was that since I created that list of podcast within iTunes, there were no Feed address associated with any of the podcast that I listen to (and there are about 30). I had to go through and edit every podcast to add the RSS feed.

As far as finding podcast, there are ways to search using MM. Digital podcast, Podcast.net and Podcast.com are included by default but you can add more directories. Even still, its a lot easier to just go to a website and search for the podcast you want and subscribe by cut n Pasting the RSS feed.

So far, MM has worked out pretty well, Ive only synced my phone once…just to see if it works, but there is a big difference as far as my system performance without having iTunes running.

MM is free, but there is a “gold” edition that cost $19.99. Also, Winamp plugins all work with MM.