My daughters have a lot of music they bought in iTunes, but unfortunately Ella lost her iPod, so she replaced it with a cheap Coby MP3 player. I wanted her to be able to get her iTunes music on there as painlessly as possible, and for her to continue to have access to newly purchased iTunes music going forward without having to go through an explicit conversion step. I was looking for a music manager that would reencode the iTunes music as vanilla MP3s on the fly during the sync process. So it leaves the iTunes files alone, but sticks MP3 versions of those files on the MP3 player during sync.

Tried Songbird, but if it supports this it wasn’t apparent. I had this same problem trying to use it for podcasts a few months back. If it does it, it’s not apparent. I want to like that program, but the things it doesn’t support are exactly the things I want.

Tried MediaMonkey, which I like, but it only supports the autoconvert feature I need on the paid version, which I was on the verge of paying for when I discovered…

MusicBee! Free, and supports autoconvert right out of the box:

Synchronise music files, podcasts and playlists from your library, or music files from any folder to many portable devices. These include iPods, iTouch/ iPhone, MTP devices (most portable devices other than iPods), and USB devices. You can also drag and drop files to the device yourself.

Artwork, tags, ratings and playcounts are all synchronised, with the option to add the track playcounts from the device to your Last.fm library.

Files can be encoded to a format supported by the device on the fly. And you have the option to normalise tracks so they play back at the same volume.

It also looks like it has podcast support baked in, although I haven’t played with that yet. Very happy with it.

Everybody swears by HandBrake as the free, open source tool for ripping DVDs. But every time I’ve used it, it hasn’t been able to rip movies. The trick, it seems, is to also install DVD43, which runs in the background waiting for you to stick in a DVD, at which point it strips off the copy protection. Voilà, Beetlejuice to Amelia’s iPod.

Update: But wait, Flushed Away continues to resist, even in the face of the Handbrake/DVD43 combination. Handbrake kept freezing trying to read the disc. So in this case, I used VLC Media Player instead, following these instructions: Rip a DVD to iTunes using VLC. Worked great, but note that in the case of Flushed Away the movie was on track 34, so step 4 of those instructions required some patience.