A couple of months back I wrote a post about how the iPod stores music internally and how you could use that knowledge to retrieve music stored on your iPod without using any external tools. This is made possible because of the fact that the iPod identifies itself as a USB connected external disk and let’s a user browse the contents of it’s filesystem using almost any operating system.
An iPhone on the other hand is an even more closed system than the iPod. While Apple atleast has opened the filesystem of an iPod, the iPhone doesn’t even let a user browse it’s filesystem contents. The only way then to manage the music on your iPhone is using a compatible version of iTunes. Right ?
Well, yes and no. While it is true that the only official method to manage music on the iPhone is using iTunes, a lot of enterprising hackers have been able to decrypt the protocol that iTunes uses to communicate with the iPhone and have created standalone utilities that let a user do stuff that Apple never wanted iTunes to do, like copy music off an iPhone.
One such utility is expod.
expod is a Mac OS X application that lets you copy all the music off your iPhone without using iTunes. expod works not only with iPhones but can be used to recover music from iPods and iPod touch’es too. It recognizes playlists that you might have created on the phone and also recognizes the metadata, i.e., the Artist and Album information, if any, embedded in the music files.
To get started, just download the expod DMG file, open it and copy the expod binary to your Mac’s Applications folder.
Connect your iPhone/iPod to your computer and launch expod.
If you see the above screen when you first launch expod with your iPod plugged in, don’t worry ! Expod will take a couple of seconds to scan your device and will present you a list of all the songs on your device.
expod displays a list of the playlists on your player on the left sidebar and a list of all the songs on the right hand side of the window. Select a playlist from the sidebar and the songs in that list will be displayed on the right.
To copy a song to your computer, just select it and press the Extract button. If you want to copy multiple songs in one go, hold down the Apple key while selecting the songs using the mouse. Or you can just shift-select to select consecutive songs. Once, you’ve selected the songs that you want to copy, Press the Extract button.
That’s it. Specify the location that you want to copy the music to, and expod will extract all the music from your iPhone/iPod and copy it to your computer.
Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja
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OMG~~ This really make my day.. Been searching for such useful software for quite some times ever seen i’ve re-formatted my mac.. Been downloading quite numbers of software but none of them works except this.. Thanks a million for posting this:D
FYI expod has now been superseded by DeTune (download it from http://www.headlightsoft.com).