Senuti for Mac 1.3.5

Senuti is a simple Mac OS X application for transferring songs from your iPod back to your computer. There are many good reasons that someone would have to transfer music from her iPod back to her computer. There are many good ways to do it, too. Senuti is the only alternative that will give you the power and convenience that you need, wrapped in an interface that is extremely easy to use, at a cost that you can't complain about.

Lightning fast -- There's a little file on your iPod called the iTunesDB file. What does that mean to you? Nothing. What does that mean to me? Everything. Every bit of information on every song on your iPod is stored in this little file. Every bit of information on your playlists is stored in this file, too. It's how iTunes knows what's on your iPod. It's how your iPod knows what's there, too. There isn't a much faster way to figure out what's on your iPod. Finding Songs -- Senuti includes all of the built in options that one would expect to find songs. You can search and sort in any combination of ways that you want. That's not quite enough sometimes, though. Sometimes you might want to know if you're copying the right song. Know how it goes, but don't know if that title is quite right? Play it. That's right, Senuti will play songs directly off of your iPod. It can even double as a jukebox player for your Shuffle or any other iPod. Playlists -- Senuti not only reads the playlists that you made on your iPod, but it allows you to transfer them back to your computer as well. A simple drag and drop action within the application will not only copy songs to your computer and and add them to iTunes, but it will make a new playlist with the same name and add all of the songs to that list. Seamless Integration -- Adding songs to your computer, you're probably going to add them to iTunes right after that, right? What if you didn't have to, wouldn't that be great? Well you don't have to. Senuti will do all of the work for you. What work you want it to do is up to you. You can have songs added to iTunes if you want. You can have all of your music organized into folders by artist and album, too. The option's yours.

Senuti for Mac helps you manage your media library by facilitating the transfer of music, movies, and podcasts from your iPhone or iPod back to your computer. Through this app, you can choose to add transferred items to iTunes, save them in a separate folder on your computer, or both.

Pros

Intro and instructions: When you first open this app, you'll be greeted with a brief walk-through that gives you an overview of what the program can do and also provides tips on how to avoid certain pitfalls. The interface is straightforward enough to begin with, but this added introduction lets you jump right in and start using the app without hesitation.

Nice interface and functionality: All options are clearly laid-out in this app's interface, and you can take advantage of some nice features, like the ability to drag and drop playlists directly into the program. Scan war completed quickly, and you can set certain preferences ahead of time, such as where you'd like to automatically save songs to, in order to save time each time you initiate a transfer.

Cons

Crashes and bugs: During testing, this app crashed every time we tried to select the Advanced Preferences tab in Settings. This probably won't be much of a concern to casual users anyway, although we were unable to learn what options were actually contained in that space. But more experienced users might be frustrated by the inability to fully customize the program to suit their needs.

Bottom Line

Senuti for Mac is a convenient and versatile program that gives you the ability to control more fully what and how you import media from your iDevice. The trial version is good for 30 days, but it has the additional limitations of a maximum of 1,000 songs transferred, and it will also pause for 30 seconds after every 10 songs. The full version costs $18.99.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Senuti for Mac 1.3.3.