A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled How to Fix iTunes. One of the utilities I pointed to in that article is called idleTunes, and I used it to keep my iTunes library tuned up, and to export playlists of podcasts to my non-iPod MP3 player. While I still love idleTunes, it stopped working with iTunes back when Apple updated to iTunes version 6, and has not been updated since last summer. So, I finally went looking for a suitable replacement, but I'm having very little luck.

The only utility I can find that is supposed to do what I'm looking to do is called iTunes Agent, and unfortunately for me it does not seem to want to play nicely on my computer. Once started, it takes over 30 seconds to respond to any command, and has become totally unusable to me. I'm fully willing to consider the fact that the problem could be my PC, given the number of downloads I test. But a reinstallation is not on the cards right now, considering that otherwise my system is working fine. So I need to find an alternative solution.

Here are my needs:

• Needs to be able to export any playlist from iTunes to any specified folder or drive
  
• Needs to generate an M3U playlist to keep the audio files in the correct order

And here are my "nice to have's":

• It would be nice if it could optionally delete the tracks from iTunes (and the hard drive) upon successfully syncing to a folder / device
• It would be nice if it could add new tracks and delete dead tracks from the iTunes library

So, based on these requirements, do you know of a utility that I should be trying? I realize Apple probably doesn't look too kindly on people writing this sort of software, since they try so hard to push you into buying an iPod. And while I'd love an iPod, I can't currently justify the purchase of one. So I'll leave it to you, dear readers, to point me in the right direction.