Managing an iPod is a simple thing, assuming you only use one computer. Plug in the iPod, wait for iTunes to open, and transfer songs to and from the iPod at your leisure. Simple. But what if you have a few computers you listen to music on? What if you have a computer, not only at home, but one at work, and perhaps you also listen to music when visiting relatives… what then?
For me, the above is pretty much my life. I have an iPod that I sync with my home computer, which is running Linux. Because of this, I don’t even use iTunes, as Apple doesn’t feel the need to come out with a version for Linux. But that’s okay, because there is a Linux solution that works. But when I visit my family, what do I do? iTunes has this built-in desire to take over whichever iPod is plugged in, and happily offers to delete everything on my iPod and sync its music library.
That is definitely not what I want to do! As I’m writing this review, I am currently listening to music on my parents’ computer, via a neat little program for Mac called Senuti.
Senuti, for those of you who are linguistically inclined, is “iTunes” spelled backwards.
Senuti is a one-trick pony as far as software goes. The only goal this program has is to allow you to transfer music from your iPod to a computer, nothing more, nothing less. Senuti can read the iTunes library of any computer you’ve attached your iPod to, but can’t copy songs from it. It can copy songs to the iTunes library (or simply to the computer’s hard drive), but it doesn’t enable a user to circumvent the DRM built into songs from the iTunes Store, which is probably a good thing for the program’s author.
As an experiment, I loaded a few items on my iPod. Six or seven are mp3 files roughly an hour long – Podcasts I downloaded off the Internet today. They were free to download and have no copy protection on them. On my iPod I also have a concert I downloaded and encoded to mp3. The last item on the iPod is a song purchased from the iTunes Store.
In every case but the last, Senuti was able to take the music from my iPod and copy it to my selected destination on my parents’ computer. It worked flawlessly. I just highlighted the songs I wanted to transfer, clicked the “Copy” button, and watched it immediately go to work. When the songs were done transferring, I could add them to the iTunes library, at which point Senuti even recognized they were already present. I could even play the songs (from within Senuti, which looks an awful lot – identical, in fact – to early versions of iTunes), while the songs were being copied over.
With the last track, however, the song purchased from the iTunes Store (and therefore encumbered with Digital Rights Management to protect from illegal copying), I ran into a slightly different situation, but one I had expected at the beginning of the attempt, one which in no way reflects poorly on Senuti. I was able to copy the track with no problems. The program didn’t have any problems copying the bits and bytes over. When I tried to play the file, however, Senuti recognized that my files were not my parents’ files, and acted accordingly.
“This computer is not authorized to play QRFB.m4b,” read the alert message. “If you purchased this song you can open iTunes and authorize this computer to play this song by entering your Apple ID and password.”
Obviously, since this computer belongs to my parents and I trust them, I did just that, and the program had no problems playing my DRM-encrusted music, once it knew it was okay to do so.
At the moment, for what it is attempting to do, Senuti is nearly perfect. Would I like to see, sometime in the future, the ability to copy songs from the computer onto the iPod? Of course I would. But that would leave the software open to claims that it promotes piracy, although the feature could be used to transfer completely free music, so I can see why that would never be an intended feature.
Senuti is currently only at version 0.33, but even so is very high quality. I would highly recommend it for those people in my situation, and am looking forward to future development of this fine program.
