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Synchronization Ease of Use (6.00)
Synchronizing the Touch, as with every iPod before it, is done through iTunes. Using iTunes, you can sync over your music by playlist. If you want your entire library to sync over, you'll have to dump it in a playlist first.
iTunes, like the Touch itself, has a bit of a learning curve, but is more or less intuitive. Your devices and playlists are lined up on the left, with the center dedicated towards listing out all the media contained therein. To customize what you synchronize with the Touch, first select the touch. This will change the main portion of the screen into a series of tabbed menus where you can set up how your music, videos, podcasts, pictures, apps, or PIM information synchronize. iTunes gives you a lot of control over the entire process.
Synchronization Features & Support (5.00)
The Touch, despite having wifi, does not support wireless synchronization out of the box. Plugging in the Touch will let it pop up as a picture drive, which won't let you fool around with your music or videos via a file explorer. If you want to get media onto or off of the Touch, you'll have to rely on iTunes, which is a bit annoying. Further, iTunes will only let you synchronize with one copy. Therefore, if you have two computers, you can't use your Touch as a means of ferrying your music to and fro. You also can't transfer songs from both computers onto the device. If you have two albums on two different computers, you'll have to use a thumb drive or some other means of file transfer to get all your music to one place. You can use the Touch's memory to transfer files, but these cannot be played or viewed on the device itself. This is not only annoying, but we're not 100% sure why it's a necessary feature. Our gut says it's anti-piracy fervor that's mad the iTunes-Touch relationship so blindly monogamous. Regardless of the reason, this setup is annoying for the user.
Providing you let iTunes organize your music and you follow all its rules, it's great software. You can import files by dragging and dropping them into iTunes. If they need to be converted into a Touch-friendly file format, they'll begin transcoding automatically in the background. iTunes will also automatically download the album art.
Overall, while it has some severe limitations, iTunes is one of the better pieces of synchronization software out there.
Other Synchronization Software Features (9.00)
iTunes performs multiple jobs. It'll sync your media, play it, organize it, and let you shop for more. Really, it's the complete package. You run into problems, however, if you personally like to keep your music organized, or if you don't want to rely on software for transferring files. For example, if you let iTunes organize your music for you, changing a song's artist or album will change your music's file structure to update the change. If you don't want iTunes to organize your music for you, any time you move files around iTunes will totally lose track of them. Other media players simply watch a set of folders and update your library automatically; changing around a subfolder won't have much of an effect. In the case of iTunes, you'll have to either enter in the file path for each moved song, or delete the broken song links and re-import the media.
A related issue deals with how iTunes handles non-AAC files. While we are fans of the automatic transcoding, we dislike issues that arise with removing and replacing songs in your library. When music is transcoded to AAC, assuming you want to keep your own music organized, the AAC file will get dropped into the original song's folder. Now, if you remove that folder from iTunes and later re-import it, iTunes will want to re-transcode the non-AAC file. Of course, since there's already an AAC file in the folder, you'll end up with duplicates. It seems Apple foresaw this cloning process, since they give you an option to view all duplicate entries. It remains annoying, however, to have to manually scroll through a list of duplicates, control-clicking (or command-clicking for Mac users) on every other item to delete the batch.
As of the newest update, iTunes and the iPod Touch can now create Pandora-esque Genius Playlists. These playlists are artificial intelligence-created lists of songs that the device things goes well together.
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