Ephpod in its basic form allows you to transfer music from your computers hard drive to your Ipod, so what's so special about that? after all iTunes Apples own software takes care if that as does musicmatch and Winamp to name just two. Well Ephpod has a number of key advantages, firstly its format independent so it can work with either windows formatted Ipod (FAT32) or Mac formatted Ipod (Mac HFS+) so you can sync both PC and Mac version from the same machine. It also supports both 3rd generation Ipod's and the new Ipod Mini, it does this by writing the main iTunes DB file which is Apples own database format for managing files once they are on an Ipod.

Fulfilling its primary task Ephpod will quickly connect to your Ipod via whatever connectivity you have on the host PC or Mac (Firewire or USB) it will then download the DB file from the Ipod and create a listing of all files on the device, this is then shown to the user in a explorer style tree and preview pane setup, its simple clean and effective. You can then choose to send files one at a time or an album at a time or most likely just ask it to sync a whole directory. We chose the later option and set a few parameters in the config menu to let it make some auto playlists and to populate the Ipod's DB from the ID3 tags then put our feet up for the hour of so it took to transfer 3000 tracks.

The transfer is as quick as you could achieve with Firewire or USB the Ephpod application adds little or no overhead to the process and has a very informative screen showing the status of the sync process including an ETA, one small niggle is that you can't minimise this window and therefore the main Ephpod window during sync.

Unlike some of the other Ipod plugins Ephpod doesn't just delete all the files and then copy them over again, it studies time and date stamps as well as file size to decide if a change is required, you can force the Ipod to always match the PC or Mac directory or just to take new files. A major benefit is that Ephpod supports the m3u play list format, so you can build play lists in Ephpod just by dragging and dropping files into a play list window, they can then be sorted by any parameter and transferred to your Pod where they will appear in the play lists menu.

There are a number of extras including limited support of the contacts (via and MS outlook plug-in) notes, there is a news feature where headlines can be downloaded to your pod to be viewed as well (sadly we haven't made this work yet). But these are extras and extras on a system that is designed to be simple and effective at its main task of syncing an Ipod from a host machine.

We've saved the best for last, Ephpod is freeware developed by Joe Masters it is still very much work in progress and a new version is typically available every 8 weeks and Ephpod accept comments and suggestions for the next release as well as any bug reports.

Compared to the bloated application plugins available for Ipod's Ephpod is a breath of fresh air, we hate the mess Music Match made of LP's Pod and after a re format and a fill up via Ephpod its visibly tidier and we are sure a much happier Pod, so lets not hold you back any longer from downloading Ephpod which is available Free as a 3.6mb file @ http://www.ephpod.com/ enjoy!

Don't forget apples new Ipod Mini Is available in the UK right now!

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