In the age of file swapping and freedom of movement, restrictions on transferring music from iTunes back to an iPod has begun to rankle - causing the emergence of a popular alternative, writes Robin O'Brien Lynch

Apple has long had a quasi-religious brand loyalty amongst its customers and, for years, devotees have struggled to convert the non-believers to change over from Windows to Mac OS.

With the iPod, the company has finally transferred that brand loyalty into market dominance and Apple has been using that dominance to increase its share of other markets.

However, within every religion there are dissenters and, although the iPod has yet to suffer from a long-predicted backlash, its partner application, iTunes, is under threat.

ITunes comes with the qualities that have given Apple its brand loyalty: it looks great, it's user-friendly and it's innovative. It also comes packaged with the world's most popular digital music player on all Macs for the past five years.

Although Macs still have only a tiny proportion of the overall market, it is an increasingly larger proportion of the home computer department, which is where most people store their music.

Here begin the problems with iTunes. Storing music at work carries the danger that you may move desk, department or job, leaving 10,000 tracks that you have carefully labelled and catalogued. This is because although Apple can boast about the thousands of tracks you can put on to your iPod, it forbids movement of traffic from iTunes to iPod, so you can't put your precious music library back on to your iPod before you hand in your notice.

On top of this, each copy of iTunes is restricted to one iPod, and Apple forbid you to use any other application but iTunes. In the age of file swapping and freedom of movement, being told to use one particular application can rankle.

Although this is clearly to Apple's benefit, and aimed at preventing piracy, these restrictions are very frustrating for everyone else.

There are ways to get around them, but most people just want to listen to their music and aren't interested in fiddling about with external hard drives or complicated procedures.

This leaves an opening for an alternative with mass appeal. Last week, the latest version of ml_iPod, a plug-in for the Winamp 5 music library was released and the publicity led to heavy downloading - over 500,000 so far.

Although ml_iPod has been around for well over a year, only in the last few months has it become an attractive option for the multitude.

The latest version, 1.20, will allow you to synchronise several iPods to one machine and copy music from the player onto the hard drive, and only takes up a 130 kilobytes, a fraction of the 20 megabytes demanded by iTunes. Winamp itself will take up 4.7 MB, but this still leaves you with a lot more memory free.

The Winamp Media player is available free at www.winamp.com, and the plug-in at www.mlipod.com. Another download allows you to import all the tracks off iTunes onto Winamp. The project was started by Winamp's developer, Justin Frankel, but has since been taken over by a team led by Will Fisher, an English student.

Fisher claims that he sees nothing ethically wrong in what he is doing, but the slogans on the site "love pub lock-ins hate the iTunes lock-in" or "your iPod just became useful" show a strong sympathy with the credo that music is there to be shared without restrictions, no matter what the music industry says.

Funding is raised by donations. When Apple released the iPod Shuffle, Fisher examined it to make it compatible with the plug-in.

Fisher claims that the plug-in will work on Windows 98 (unlike iTunes) and on all versions of the iPod, although several users have complained about glitches with the Shuffle.

Other minor irritants remain, and it may be worth waiting a few months to see how rapid the fixing process is.

A list of FAQs and troubleshooting pointers is available at the Winamp discussion forums. The link is on the plug-ins homepage.

A change will involve downloading Winamp, the plug-in, the import plug-in and yet another plug-in that allows you to buy tunes from the iTunes store and circumvent the copyright management.

However, once all this is done, using the library will work the same as using iTunes, and this is what gives Fisher's project an advantage over the alternatives.

If it really catches on, it will be a popular vote against iTunes that Apple is unlikely to let go unnoticed.

Apple already put a lot of time and effort into stopping this sort of thing, and it will be surprising if future versions of iTunes aren't modified to prevent the plug-in working.

However, there maybe a precedent here that Apple is ignoring. In the eighties, the Macintosh was one of the first globally popular personal computers, and Apple's dominance of the market looked like it would stretch ahead for decades.But it refused to license the Mac operating system to other manufacturers and Microsoft took their OS, made their own, and licensed it to whoever wanted it.

Now Microsoft Windows is on over 80 per cent of the world's PCs and Mac OS is on less than 10 per cent. Apple has its brand loyalty of course, but went through some turbulent times while Microsoft was taking over the world.

The two situations are not really comparable, and the iPod does have a staggering dominance in the market. But that's what they said about the Macintosh, and Apple would do well to consider some flexibility.