Am I the only one (who doesn’t already have an axe to grind with him) who thinks that Dave Winer “repeated”:http://www.scripting.com/2005/11/29.html#When:2:41:31AM “complaints”:http://www.scripting.com/2005/11/25.html#When:12:42:42PM about “iTunes purging his music when he hooked it to a new machine”:http://www.scripting.com/2005/11/24.html#When:11:12:50PM are a little dubious?

Arrrgh, I plugged my new iPod into my old Mac and lost everything on it. Never got a confirmation dialog asking if it was okay if it wiped out the music and audiobooks that I painstakingly took hours of my time to set up. Never mind that the originals are on the other side of the United States. Honestly, how dare they design software that’s so brutal?

iTunes puts up a confirmation dialog when you hook an iPod to it that already has content on it letting you know that it will wipe all the existing content if you proceed. It does give you the option to go forward, and never see the message again.

Warnings aside, what really sucks is that Apple does their best to make it impossible for people to add content to their iPods from multiple computers. It may be that this scenario just didn’t fit into their (Steve’s) pure white vision of the iPod experience, but I think it’s more likely that it was a compromise to placate the recording industry who didn’t want to see the iPod used as the backbone of a P2P sneakernet.

Fortunately, there is software that makes it possible to move tracks on and off iPods in a fine grained fashion. “Sharepod”:http://www.sturm.net.nz/website.php?Section=iPod+Programs&Page=SharePod#download works on Windows, and can be run directly off the iPod. “PodWorks”:http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17443 seems to offer similar features on MacOS. Sharepod and PodWorks aren’t the only options either, there are probably a half dozen alternatives on each platform.

Update:Dave has done experiments to confirm that “iTunes isn’t prompting him before overwriting his iPod”:http://www.scripting.com/2005/11/30.html#When:6:10:50AM when he hooks it to a new itunes library.