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Some people think the iPod and iTunes are podcasting and portable, digital music.

Others chafe at the restrictions placed upon the user by Apple.

Count me among the latter.

I do have an iPod. It cost some $300 about seven years go. I don't know if I ever wrote my post about how I used to use it as a backup drive, barely as a music/podcast player, until I removed its protective rubber cover, let it get suitably scratched and then used the hell out of it for a subsequent year.

But ... I couldn't load it with files from any of my computers. No, it was and still can only be updated from the iBook G4 on which we run iTunes. I can't drop a music file or podcast onto it from my iTunes installation on my Windows PC, from which I manage the iTunes portion of the Daily News' growing number of podcasts.

I can't manage the iPod in Linux. Aside from the iTunes way of attempting to force users to use one computer and one computer only to manage any given iPod (and my situation is even more complicated due to my iPod being initialized on a Mac and having the HFS+ filesystem, as opposed to the more-easily dealt-with FAT filesystem on Windows-initialized iPods), I just want to use my device the way I want, on the OSes I want, and with the files delivered the way I want.

So I bought a $20 player — the 4 GB Centron Craze MP3 Player — that, to be frank, sounds great but has a shit user interface.

But it only cost $20, has a small but useful LCD screen and allows me to drag/drop files of any sort onto it from any PC and OS that reads FAT filesystems (and that's EVERY OS out there, pretty much).

Right now I'm pretty much only using it for podcasts, and I've followed the lead of Fab and Dan of Linux Outlaws in using gPodder.

GPodder is fast, cross-platform (Linux, FreeBSD, even Windows), supports both iPods and "regular" MP3 players, and provides a most excellent way to "catch," listen to and load up podcasts on your favorite audio device.

The way I have it set up in Debian Lenny, with the now-ancient version 0.12.1 (Debian Sid has version 2.1), it can download a dozen podcasts simultaneously and automatically drops them on my cheap MP3 player.

While I bought the Centon player (navigation is horrible; did I mention that?) on impulse, there are better MP3 players that aren't the iPod, don't sell for iPod prices, and unlike the iPod and my Centon play the Ogg and FLAC open/free file formats.

Among these are the Sansa Clip, which I've heard of but never heard. I'll be on the lookout for one of these, and I'm more than a little eager to start ripping CDs to the lossless FLAC format. I even have the Ogg codec installed on my Windows PC, and I use the Windows Media Player to listen to Ogg-encoded music.

I guess that means my geek credentials are pretty much being revoked, using WMP to listen to Ogg ... but I don't put a lot of stock into said credentials, and I'm OK with them being pulled by the rest of the geek theocracy.

Before that happens, I encourage all of you to give gPodder a try.