gdgt

Post in the MediaMonkey forums. They're much more responsive.

Me, I stick to iTunes for my iPods. Too many hoops otherwise, although Mediamonkey is probably the least hoop-laden alternative.

i'm in the same boat I really want to leave iTunes but i need an application that will Sync and act as a podcatcher.

Depends on what iPod you have, but j.River Media Center ($50) does include an integrated podcatcher, as well as powerful libary functions. Check on iPod compatibility though - only older machines are supported, and none of the Touch/iPhones (Apparently this is Apple's fault for not making it easy to implement *rolleyes* - something that doesn't seem to have deterred MediaMonkey).

You could also use MediaMonkey along with a podcatcher since it has automatic library monitoring.

Bottom line is that nothing will be as simple (or as convenient, since most of the alternatives don't sync playcounts properly either) as iTunes. Which is why I still use it for my iPods. For everything else (bar Zune or any other non-standard-sync device), j.River works very well. I hesitate to recommend j.River since the dev team have such a bad attitude, but I have to admit it's still a fairly superior piece of software.

double Twist is an excellent application.

I'v had similar problems with Floola, where the music is added into the player, but the music database is not updated, thus not being able to read or play the file on the player.

But it only happened when I "unsafely" ejected the iPod.

Try using another iTunes alternative, and see if the problem still exists.

Solution: Restore to Factory settings and start over.

Heres what happened. I Synced with WinAmp first expecting I would use that media player. when it fell short of my expectations, I switched to Media Monkey. Even though Media Monkey Synced once, and I Updated the database, whatever data WinAmp put on the Ipod was messing it up. So restoring the iPod to factory default, and syncing with MediaMonkey from the get-go worked.

I am very happy with this configuration, It is working almost as seamlessly as my Zune did with the Zune Software, with the exception of auto syncing the iPod while its plugged in (the iPod only auto-syncs when I plug it in, not when new media is detected after the initial sync).