If you have an iPod shuffle and you’re content dealing with iTunes, don’t bother reading this. I was getting fed up with the fact that every time I plugged my iPod into a friend’s machine, or into my work machine, iTunes would bark that the iPod was already synced with another iTunes installation (my Mac) and would ask if I wanted to erase everything on it and sync with this one instead. I realize I can apportion some of the iPod as regular flash space to carry files from one machine to another, but what I wanted to do was to copy music onto the iPod like any normal flash disk, listen to the music in the car on the way to work using the Ipod controls, then maybe grab some different music for the ride home from my work machine. Sometimes I wanted to rip a bunch of disks at one location, and listen to them in the car and then copy them off to my home machine at some point. Apple’s pact with the recording industry made simple uses like this impossible… that is, until an open source project developed in python opened up my iPod (shuffle) and let me use it the way I wanted to.

rebuild_db is a python script which you can put onto the iPod shuffle, that when run, will rebuild the database that the iPod uses to play music. As long as you install python on whatever machine you happen to have (Linux and Mac will already have it installed but it’s trivial to install in Windows too), you can use this script to take control of your iPod. Now I can just copy files to the Ipod shuffle, double click the script icon to rebuild the database, and listen to the stuff I put on there which is available to copy off again on any machine I plug it into. Doing this means that the iPod shuffle will not sync with iTunes anymore, and you have to eject the device as you would any normal flash disk, but I think this is a small price to pay for being freed from iTunes evil grasp.