Okay -- deep breath. This might take a little while.

I was blessed with a 20GB 3G iPod for Easter and, through much biting of nails and gnashing of teeth (and tons of help from searching the ipodlounge forum -- thanks, you guys!), I managed to get my new obsession working with my four year old Gateway Solo laptop (I know, I know), running Win98SE. I installed the trial version of Anapod -- v8.5.2 -- and all was bliss. I'd tried Ephpod, but I didn't care for it much, as it has this nasty tendency to crash a little too often for my tastes. Anapod, however, worked like a charm.

Fast-forward fifteen days. My trial period is over, so I go for the full version of Anapod. Twenty-five bucks? Totally worth it for the simple-but-effective little program.

...except, as soon as the full version of Anapod (v8.5.4) was installed and activated, connecting my iPod resulted in no visible music. The tracks were all still there, but I had no way of accessing them. "Recover Missing Tracks" seemed to work, but, when I would hit "OK" after the recovery was finished and opened up an Anapod Explorer window, expecting to see my songs... nothin'. Still nothin'.

Thinking that, perhaps, iTunesDB was corrupted for some reason, I followed the directions on redchairsoftware's Known Issues page for rebuilding the database (back up a copy of iTunesDB, remove the original copy from the folder, and "Recover Missing Tracks" to rescan all the music on the iPod), but that didn't work, either.

It was after about half a day of troubleshooting that I decided to email red. Extremely nice and very professional, but the only real suggestion in that first email was that I make sure that iTunes wasn't running at the same time as Anapod. Considering I'm running Win98SE, as I noted in my email to red, I don't even have iTunes installed, so that's not the issue. Red said that they tried "Recover Missing Tracks" on their iPods and that it worked just fine. Next suggestion: back up iTunesDB and rebuild the database, because the file is probably corrupted. I said that I'd already tried that, as well.

The thing? I don't understand why the database would be corrupted, because Ephpod can work with my iPod just fine. When I probed for missing songs using Ephpod, everything came up roses (although the tags were a complete mess, and it took a day for me to get my 1500 songs looking pretty again). As soon as I tried connecting to Anapod again... my iPod would show no songs whatsoever. Back into Ephpod, and I could recover them. It has to be an Anapod issue, right?

I asked red if the problem might be that I'm running firmware v2.1 on my iPod and if the version of Anapod that I installed when I paid for the program -- v8.5.4 -- might not be compatible with firmware v2.1, because Anapod v8.5.2 -- the trial version I used without a single glitch for over two weeks -- worked fine with it. I'm not updating my iPod's firmware for a little while; I've heard people have had problems with the newest update, so I'm going to go with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy (the same philosophy that has resulted in my using Eudora v1.5.2 since 1996, but hey!).

Redchairsoftware hasn't emailed me back since I emailed them and said that I wasn't going to try messing with iTunesDB unless it was their only other suggestion; I said that I'd put a couple of days of work into getting my iPod working right again, using Ephpod, and I didn't want all that work to go down the drain -- or, worse, get my songs erased from the iPod's HD for real -- by risking connecting to Anapod again. I asked if they knew what could be causing the problem, but, again, no reply yet. That's why I decided to take it to you guys.

A couple of quick notes: no, I haven't been running Ephpod and Anapod at the same time (I know they can "overwrite" each other); I don't have iTunes; and my versions of Anapod are 8.5.2 (the trial version, which worked fine until the trial period ran out) and 8.5.4 (the full version, which has yet to work).

Any ideas, guys? I'd really like to get Anapod to work; I much prefer it to Ephpod, and, being a college student who received the iPod as a gift, twenty-five bucks for a program that doesn't work is quite the sacrifice.

--JP