My vision of the world is that you should be able to buy music once and listen to it anywhere. But big corporate forces are stubbornly refusing to make devices inter-operate while they wrestle for control of the digital music business.
iTunes has always been able to sync to iPods, but that's where it ends. There's a new free plugin for iTunes called BadApple which overcomes this problem by letting iTunes sync to any MP3 player, not just iPods. Once downloaded and installed, it adds functionality to iTunes to communicate with any USB-connected device.
BadApple does not work with DRM music. If you've paid money to rent music from the iTunes store those tracks come wrapped with DRM and cannot be copied to other devices. This is a good example of why not to spend money on DRM. BadApple will work with all songs downloaded in MP3 format or encoded from your own CDs.
--MR
