Hi everyone,

My GF just got a new 5G iPod to go along with her Powerbook. I some multi-platform interoperability questions about this whole thing and figured that you guys have probably cracked this nut already.

Our MP3 collection (we added her entire CD collection when we "shacked up") sits on a linux file server. I've mentioned in other threads that we're both really into music, and the MP3 collection is enormous (approx. 460GB). I started this whole thing when many of you did, before there were v2 tags, and many of the files have bad tags. My ripping/encoding tool at the beginning also did not handle the year tag correctly, so the oldest files are *all* tagged 1994...

Anyhow, we're retagging the entire collection and are about 35% complete.

Since our mp3s are already organized on the server, we don't really need iTunes to "manage" our music collection for us. In fact, I don't want it to.

Since we have both a Powerbook and Windows machines available, what is the best tool to use to manage the iPod content? Is iTunes the best option given that we have the mp3s already organized on the file server? Should we bother with iTunes at all?

If we want to use iTunes as a player, is there any way to build the iTunes library without importing all of the files into iTunes. Is there any software out there that can run on the server and create the iTunes library (which I think is just an XML file) using the file structure? ISTR someone here mentioning a iTunes server that can run on linux/Unix...

Thanks again. I may have asked some of these questions before, but its all jumbled up now.

Jim