Sweetwater Sound, makers of SetMaker and resellers of MIDI and musician’s equipment, today announced the release of Musician’s iPod Tools, a suite of programs designed to help musicians store data in their iPods. And like SetMaker, it’s free.
The Musician’s iPod Tools suite enables you to store gig lists, music equipment lists, song title lists, set lists, a basic calendar of events or even a list of recipes on your iPod.
Musician’s iPod Tool is comprised of two separate components: ContactsTool and the MP3Tool. ContactsTool allows you to store any kind of list in the iPod’s Contacts section as a v-card text file. It processes any tab-delimited text file — up to five fields — and outputs it as a text file in v-card format. You simply drop that file into the Contacts folder your iPod. There’s also a special “Calendar Import” option that helps you move data from calendar applications like TeamAgenda.
The MP3Tool enables you to store any kind of list in the iPod as an MP3 file — it adds blank MP3 files to iTunes and formats them with the data from any 2-field or less tab-delimited text file. You can then navigate through actual data on your MP3 file list, just like you would normally browse through the iPod to find a song.
Sweetwater president and founder Chuck Surack explained that he wanted an easy way to access info about his upcoming gigs using his own iPod — Musician’s iPod Tools was developed as a result.
“The tools are really simple to use and it’s been wonderful to be able to carry around all my favorite music and my entire calendar in the same little iPod. Amazing,” said Surack.
You can download Musician’s iPod Tools from Sweetwater’s Web site now, but be aware that this initial release is for Mac OS 9.x. The company assured users that they’re hard at work on an OS X version and hope to have it out soon.