I love my EEE, it’s fantastic – I’ll be taking it on holiday instead of the Philips X53 for the first time this year.

It does everything, bar one thing….. Manage my iPod. I used to be able to switch albums on the iPod at the end of every day, a quick sync and new music or podcasts for tomorrow – holidays are a great time for catching up on podcasts!

Alright I know that with the EEE the hard drive probably couldn’t hold all my music, but I’d be willing to invest in a light external USB hard drive (as recommended by), as I only have a 2GB Nano.

I’ve read about getting iTunes working under Crossover, or Wine. Both of these solutions seem to be frought with a problems trying to get something to run on a box that it was never designed for!

Whilst looking at possible random solutions this week, I stumbled across Songbird based on the Mozilla platform (like all things at Mozilla developers). As Mark O’Neill says, it’s always worth being interested in anything based on this platform that the Mozilla guys thing is worth linking to!

One of the major advantages I noted (apart from it being open source and having all the tabs and whistles you’d expect from Mozilla), is that you can choose to buy music from iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store and eMusic.

Mark notes another problem:

One problem I have found is that you cannot run iTunes music files on both iTunes and Songbird at the same time. So if you want to run iTunes music on Songbird, you must first de-authorize and uninstall iTunes from your computer. This is the hated DRM copy protection at work, not the fault of Songbird.

Mark says it’s not an iTunes killer yet, but it does hold the same kind of promise that Firefox did when you started looking at it alongside Internet Explorer. This is a project I’ll be watching!

If/when I do get round to do thing, I’d definitely be following the guide that Ross wrote – “How to use Songbird to manage your iPod“