I love to listen to music, and so does everyone else in my family.  Everyone has an MP3 player of some kind or other, mostly because they turn out to be lifesavers on long trips.  When we travel with the kids to the States, we spend at least five hours on the road in each direction.  With the kids cocooned in their musical sanctuaries, my wife and I enjoy a much less troublesome ride.  My wife’s car (and the new car that I plan to buy) has an auxiliary input, which means that we’re also able to use our MP3 players to provide ourselves with a decent variety of audio entertainment on long trips without either renewing an expensive satellite radio subscription or burning dozens of cds.  The only sticking point is this: how do I find an easy, consistent way to manage everyone’s music collection?

My son can manage his own music .  He’s on his third music player, so he’s very familiar with his Zune and with its software.  My iPod Touch and my wife’s Zune are both his discards, as it turns out.  My daughter has an off-brand player with only 2GB of storage space which is for now enough room to handle her entire collection.  So.  Son’s music?  Covered.  He manages it himself.  Daughter’s music?  Only slightly more difficult.  Her music player appears as a removable drive when I connect it to a computer, so it’s a simple drag-and-drop to get her music arranged.  My wife’s Zune software is actually installed on my laptop, and I synchronize her playlists from music stored on an external hard drive.  And I have iTunes installed on my desktop in order to manage my music.  To do those things individually isn’t necessarily that complex a thing to manage, but I do wish that I could install one single piece of software from which I could do all three of those things with all three of those devices.

The Zune proprietary software refuses to recognize my iPod.  iTunes refuses to synchronize Zune playlists, and neither will allow me to send music to my daughter’s little off-brand player.  So I suppose that what I should actually plan to do is to make a concerted effort to find some kind of alternate software to accomplish what I want.  I don’t know if something like that is out there, but if it is, I certainly hope to find it.