media monkey in ...itunes out

I have had a stressful few days .. I like music and love my ipod and mp3.. I am ever so slowly converting my CD collection into MP3s ... for a while now (ok exactly after I let my ipod play with a borrowed apple computer) it has been as sulky and uncommunicative as any teenager ... recently it hasn't wanted to download podcasts (I enjoy podcasts, most probably because you can listen too them when you want) and the ones it has downloaded have become hidden under the music parts of my ipod which means I can't delete them from itune (and while there, why the heck can't you delete files from the ipod menu? or are we being protected from oursleves in the clasic appline ways) .. ok to cut the long story short I decided to upgrade my Itunes to version 7.7 (it had been nagging me to do so for a while)... ok ok, I should have type "itunes 7.7 problems" into google first and seen the thousands of angry items... but hey it seemed like a good idea at the time ... I'll spare you every detail but the update crashed and attempte to reload it got the repair or unistall response (even though i clicked on install) and neither of those worked either> Then many hours later I found some wisdom that I had to download an install cleanup routine from mircosoft then re-install itunes (I will not give all the messy details, my advice is JUST DO NOT UPGRADE to Itunes Version 7.7 on a pc)... then the TRAGICALLY BAD BIT ... my entire music library was trashed!

Then a friend said try media monkey. Less than ten minutes later the software was downloaded, the ipod talking to the computer ... and media monkey was sifting through my Mp3s making them look like a library again, and I have selected a wicked PSP like skin on the monkey media player... but there is one down side I haven't got media monkey scrobbling to last.fm yet! ...such is life