Apple’s iPod is the most popular media player on the planet and together with the iTunes software and music store command almost 90% of the market for digital music and music players.
With the amount of money at stake, it is not a surprise that Apple likes to maintain tight control over the iTunes/iPod ecosystem. For example, officially the only way to manage music on an iPod is to use the iTunes software. And even then music can only be copied from the computer to the iPod, not the other way round.
If your computer crashes or you happen to change your computer, you’re out of luck as far as your music is concerned, since iTunes won’t let you copy it back.
Unless you follow this guide and do as I tell you to.
There are two ways to go get all your music off your iPod. One method involves using third party software to get the data that you want and the second method involves using what you already have, Windows. We’ll be talking about the second method today.
If you want any of the two method to work, though, Click Cancel on the message that pops up as soon as you connect the iPod to the computer.
Now, select the iPod in iTunes and make sure that the “Manually Manage music and videos” and “Enable disk use” options are checked.
You should now be able to see your iPod as a removable disk in My Computer. If it doesn’t show up, you might have to manually eject and then reconnect the iPod to the computer.
Make sure you have enabled the option to view hidden files and folders on your computer. If you’re using Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the option is tucked under My Computer -> Organize -> Folder and Search Options. Look under the view tab.
Now, on the iPod, Browse over to the iPod_Control folder and you will see a folder named, well, Music. This is where iTunes stores all your music files, under the various folders that you see here.
The only problem with this scheme is that since iTunes likes to give all the media files encrypted names that only iTunes understands, you won’t be able to look at the files and find that one track that you were looking for.
But, the good thing is that the metadata is all there so if you’d copy these tracks back to your computer and import them back to iTunes, you’ll be able to recognize the songs easily.
How do you guys copy music off your iPods ?
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About Sharninder: Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja |
5 Comments
yamipod
gtkpod
Does gtkpod work with the latest iPod firmware ? Last I read it didn’t, but then I haven’t been keeping track of iPod firmwares since a long time now.
I always had trouble getting music of my iPod. This should make things a lot easier. Thanks for sharing
Glad you found the post useful Julius. And thanks for stopping by.
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[...] for updates on this topic.Powered by WP Greet Box WordPress PluginA 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 [...]