What is the BEST WAY to download music to an ipod?

simple, Itunes database of apple lossless error correction on. drag the cd's or playlists or cuts into the ipod icon....super easy.

I found Sharepod to be the best software to download/upload songs from PC to iPod and vise versa. You don't have to have iTunes on your machine. This is a simple software that does not have a "install" process. Just download and use...that simple.

http://www.getsharepod.com/

I'll check them both out....thanx for the input

I've seen a few people using a program other than iTunes for iPod music stuff. Maybe I'm missing something, but why would anyone use anything other than iTunes for this? I'm not talking about music playback on a stereo/server system, I'm talking about iPod stuff (and everything else Apple).

Kbarkamian, I use iTunes to sync with the iPod, but that's it. I use MediaMonkey to rip the CD's to FLAC, and I wrote a Perl program that sits on my Linux music server and runs nightly to create MP3 equivalents of the new FLAC files. This separate MP3 tree is then used for the iPod syncing. The FLAC files are used for my serving my Squeezeboxes.

I really, really wish iTunes would be able to acknowledge any new files placed in certain directories, rather than needing to add the files to the library manually. And I wish that iTunes would be able to utilize FLAC. Those are significant downsides that I see of iTunes at the moment.

Michael