A COMPUTER SCIENCE student from Cambridge University has perfected a plug-in for the music management software Winamp that allows iPod users to dump Apple's iTunes and use Winamp instead.
Will Fisher said he picked up on the open-sourced project after buying an iPod and struggling to integrate his music collection on his iPod with that on his PC managed by WinAmp.
The 20-year-old took on work begun by Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp and P2P system Gnutella. Frankel decided to open source his work on the ml_iPod plug-in and Will says it sat on a virtual shelf until he picked it up and ran with it.
"I just found iTunes inconvenient," young Will told the INQUIRER. "So we added lots of features to the ml_iPod and now it's a little better than iTunes. It allows you to copy music from an iPod to a computer and it integrates with a DRM removal tool that allows you to remove DRM on the fly."
Apple's iTunes does not permit users to move music from the iPod to a computer. You can put 'em on but you can't take 'em off.
Will says he thinks that once you have purchased a tune you should be able to hear it wherever you want. DRM routines that prevent such use are "ethically wrong", he says.
He adds that he believes in the "fair-use" reasons for using the ml_iPod plug-in. "The point is that there are plenty of things you can do with it that aren't illegal. I trust my users to use ml_iPod responsibly and not steal music," he said.
The second-year student says other people contributed to the project and confesses he was rather shocked at the amount of interest his work had provoked, especialy when the INQUIRER - his homepage - got in touch. "It's interferfing with my studies a bit," he confessed.
The Winamp iPod plugin works with all kinds of iPod, from the first-generation, to the iPod shuffle and the latest models.
