Ready to ditch your Windows PC for a touch of Linux? You don’t have to leave your iPod behind.

Apple’s iPod has created a worldwide army of fans who sync their life with their music via a Windows PC or Mac computer. But what if you’re one of the growing numbers of users who are ready to ditch Windows Vista and dive head-first into the cup that is Linux?

Apple has no Linux version of iTunes but that doesn’t mean you should pout and stay with Windows. The demand for an iTunes-like tool to bring the Linux love to iPod has been growing steadily over the last couple of years. We’ve found five tools that could save your sanity and bring Linux and iPod together.

Amarok

Amarok is a cool player loaded with features including album artwork support (if you don’t have it, it will find the artwork for you from the web), lyric support, Wikipedia integration plus of course, syncing support for your iPod. Amarok is supported by a number of Linux distros including Gentoo, Ubuntu and openSUSE and you can either install it from distribution packages or build up the latest SVN source yourself. You do need KDElibs installed but that’s it as far as KDE is concerned. There’s a good forum and community built around this one. Definitely an iTunes alternative that’s going places.

Banshee

Banshee is one of the bigger management/player options for the iPod on Linux. It allows you to rip audio CDs and sync them to your iPod. It can also create playlists and burn MP3 and audio CDs. It also supports album cover art. It’s currently available on a number of Linux distros including openSUSE 10.1+, Ubuntu and Gentoo. It supports more than just the iPod as well as Creative players and other players conforming to the USB mass storage device standard. There’s also a bucketload of plugins from Internet radio to podcasts and DAAP music sharing.

Gtkpod

Gtkpod is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the iPod using GTK2. It’s been tested with GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. Like most of these tools, Gtkpod gives you quite good control over what you do with your iPod including allowing you to extract and export tracks from your iPod. It can view, add and modify album art, read and update the iTunesDB database file. It doesn’t do any file conversion. It’s available in source form or as a precompiled binary. Not a complete tool but still pretty useful all the same.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is another management tool for Linux and was specifically designed to work on the GNOME desktop however there’s a very good tutorial on how to get this to work directly on Ubuntu. Rhythmbox supports searching and sorting, playlists and has an easy-to-use iTunes-like music browser. This one is quite a slick design and looks to work well. It also supports various audio formats provided you have GStreamer on your system.

Songbird

Songbird is one of the projects being support by Mozilla and at the moment is still in pre-release. It looks likely to become THE third-party tool for iPods and MP3 players in general with a huge list of features, very cool interface and the ability to skin it. There’s a reasonable list of requirements to get it working and although only at “proof of concept” stage, it works and can be used with an iPod now. At the moment, only the Windows version is being offered as there are recent reports from Songbird that the Linux and Mac OS version are having trouble but definitely check with the site regularly. This is going to be the iTunes alternative to watch.

This one needs no installation and supports most of the major operating systems. Among its features is the ability to copy MP3 and AAC music to and from the iPod.  It handles syncing of your iPod to your PC and supports news and podcast uploading. There’s even a built-in music player and it can detect and remove duplicate tracks. It’s also available in 28 different languages. This one is built on GTK+ 2.0.