I hope this doesn’t come as a shocker to anyone, but iTunes on Windows is terrible. It’s slow, always running something in the background, calling home to Apple all the time, backing things up when you don’t want it to, destroying all your music with Apple DRM, etc  In short, it mucks up a completely fine Windows system (whether intentional or not on Apple’s part, idk). A few years back I received a second generation iPod Touch for christmas, and since then have been gritting my teeth and suffering through iTunes, because I could never quite get it to sync right with anything else.

However, a few weeks back I built a new home pc, complete with a fresh installation of Windows 7, and decided that I would NOT muck up my pristine, new system with iTunes. I still wanted to be able to sync my iPod Touch, though. I looked at Songbird, a free, nice-looking alternative, however it currently does not have the podcast support I’d like  MediaMonkey, however, has excellent podcast support, and syncs with a myriad of devices, iPods included. I wish I could say that I just installed MediaMonkey, plugged in my iPod, and it worked, but why would Apple make it that easy? Instead, I spent hours with Google searches and scouring forums just to get the damn thing to sync. By the end I was victorious, but it seemed like a lot of work for such a simple task, and nowhere online could I find a single, comprehensive guide to what is required. So I figured it might be useful for some people if I posted what I did here.

But I hate it when bloggers just ramble on and on forever before getting to the real meat of the post, so here it goes:
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