1) In all fairness, its difficult for Songbird to officially support the iPod’s. That’s probably one reason why the iPod support plugin is now longer officially supported. Apple doesn’t exactly post a developers guide on-line.
2) The iPod’s aren’t easy to test. In the past, they were often jamming up, crashing, and getting corrupt. When Apple switched OS on them, things got better, but even for Apple, I’d imagine that even they considered the previous generations to be nightmares (not really their fault, because at the time, they simply didn’t have decent processors).
3) Having worked in an Applecentre, I saw plenty of people accidentally wipe their music off their iPod in my time (In the past, the warning Apple provided wasn’t that great when it was linked to another itunes collection).
4) I STILL find it incredibly hard to believe that people are deleting music they legally own off their computer. It shouldn’t have happened, but I can’t imagine any legal situation it would matter.
5) Testing iPod’s I’d imagine would be a nightmare. Furthermore, POTI revoked the extension pretty quickly when a problem was discovered, AND ACKNOWLEDGED IT! I’ve seen plenty of major companies sit on plenty of major problems pretending they don’t exist (such as with the battery recalls).

Anyway, as mentioned, its not a problem any more. iTunes two way syncing is the recommended method now. Furthermore, they open sourced the plugin now, so you may test it properly and improve it if you wish

Ishan, agreed. Not everyone knows how to back up music by pulling it off of the Ipod. I do, but many other people I know don’t know how or have the time to.

The Doctor and Joren-Nice of you to harass people who have lost their whole music collections. And you’re implying it was the user’s fault for using Songbird!? Well they’ve learned now and won’t use it again I’m sure.

Also Joren, Songbird does not “have to” offer anything. But where is the page when you install it that says “Hey this may wipe ALL of your Ipod music when you use it.” I didn’t know there was a disclaimer? I doubt there was, or no one would have installed it.

The developers can argue with me all they want. I have seen a ton of people’s comments on other sites who have lost their collections, and thought I would share my opinion.

I know this topic is dead, but I’d just like to counter:

Is your world-view really this childish? Have you ever read an EULA?

You need to grow up.

I’m sorry if you find what I said condescending – but I am glad you also see I was only trying to be constructive, and not just bagging you guys out in rage or anything. I hope that you also can extend your judgement and not write me off as someone who would say something like that having only experienced it on one machine. I have 2 work machines (win, mac), a media center (win), a powerbook (mac) and have gotten around 5 people in the office to install songbird on their pc’s. And it’s not the crashes that bug me (at all), it’s how, at any point in time, there’s always SOMETHING that’s not working or in this case wipes ipods it feels a lot more solid than it used to. I was just pointing out that there seems to be a push toward adding features than stability, judging by the releases to date (except 1.1 which seems a step ahead in terms of stability). If that’s not the case, then, sorry.