Loading the iAudio X5.

So... I've been using the X5 for a while now, and after I decided to forego the iPod as my main player (mainly because I do, for my own uses, find the UMS and USBOTG capability quite handy), I've been trying to find ways to get the X5 to... er... work like the iPod. Heh.

I've not got further in the lack of album-based browsing when your folders are sorted by artists, but I have made some headway in getting music on and off the player in a managed way.

For the music management software, I've been using j.River Media Center. There are some counterintuitive aspects to this program, but on the whole it is easy to use, and more importantly extremely powerful as a management tool. In fact it's a lot more than that, since it can act as a Home Theater front end as well but it's strengths are in media management. Because you can rig it up (in fact, the default setting) to look like iTunes, there is no major culture shock in moving to it. I'd suggest you try the 30-day trial edition to get a feel of this package. It's one of the few that I thought really worth paying for when there's something like iTunes available for free.

One of the things that Media Center doesn't do is to auto-launch when you dock the iAudio. So I solved this by using Quickfind's Autoplay Repair, a tool which allows you to edit the Autoplay entries. I just set up Media Center to launch in there.

Next, I wanted to sync the podcasts I subscribe to. iPodder dumps your podcasts arranged by subfolders into whatever folder you nominate, so I just set up SyncToy as an Autoplay entry and set up the X5 to sync with the podcast folder.

Now, I'm quite pleased with the overall set-up.