How to Get Music Off Your iPod

ptorrone writes "Never did we think we'd need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately it's a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. Here's how to get your stuff off for free on a Mac or PC and how to re-enable a useful tool with a Hex editor." Cory Doctorow has been writing about this on boingboing recently; he discusses Apple's message to iPod owners.

Comments

WARNING NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

[minus_273]

story link contains pornographic ads.

Re:WARNING NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

It's noon on the East Coast, this story is being read by tons of people from work, and a lot of people can be fired if their web proxy detects them downloading pictures like this. I can't direct link to the image because it's generated by a PHP script, but basically it's a topless woman holding a string to barely cover some of her nipples. You could get fired for looking at that at most companies, and it's on the main page of the story link to boingboing.net. It's on topic and people deserve this warning to keep their jobs!

If you must moderate me down so be it but I don't want anyone fired because a story reviewer was irresponsible.

Far simpler way (on a Mac)

[SuperKendall]

On a Mac it's pretty easy to get everything off the iPod - fire up a shell, wander into the directory where the music is stored on the mounted iPod, and simply copy out what you want.

The tool they talk about would make it easier but even a novice can use a shell if they are just following directions.

What the fuck?

[MoneyT]

Seriously. This stuff has been common knowledge since the first generation iPod. There have been numerous softwares to accomplish the same thing and many of them can be found at iPodlounge.com

A simple google search will turn up more than enough results. Was it really nesse3sary to put this on the front page of Slashdot?

Re:Story = Engadget Plug

[ptorrone]

did you not see the "we" with the link to engadget? it's pretty clear that i am with engadget. you might think this info is found in ten seconds with google, but a lot people have no idea which tools are free, which ones work and how to use them. if you can find _one_ article that shows how to do all this for macs, pcs and the hexedit info (again, all in one article that's easy to follow) please let me know. it would have been easier than spending a few hours doing this.

cheers,
pt

CopyPod

[phallstrom]

There's also CopyPod for Windows which allows you to select individual albums/songs. http://www.copypod.net/index.php

Winamp and iPod plugin

[sielwolf]

Just use the iPod support plugin in Winamp. Not only does it let you sync and listen to your iPod in Winamp, it allows you to "Copy Selection to Hard Drive". There are still some kinks in it. It has a habit of creating literal album names for directories (which is a problem for DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...". Windows doesn't like them ellipses).

Of course worse comes to worst I navigate into the iPod in Windows Explorer, CTRL+C all the directories and CTRL+V it onto my Harddrive. No big deal.

It's not actually that hard!

[AmunRa]

Just to clarify, it's not actually that hard to get music off an iPod. Sure, iTunes won't let you copy music off it, but on a PC, it's this simple:

1. Enable 'Firewire Disk Usage'
2. Open up explorer, ensure hidden files are visible and browse to the 'iPod_Control\Music' folder on you iPod.

Voila! - All your mp3s are there - you can even play then straight off the iPod (in something like WinAMP) if you like.

Admittedly, on a Mac you have to resort to the Terminal (basically all the music files are hidden in Finder), but it's not exactly rocket science!

Wrong

[kmmatthews]

" Apple didn't have any choice. If they don't play nice with the suicidally stupid record industry, the industry will stop supplying music for the iPod."

That's not what the article says, the article REFUTES that point, sheesh.

Re:Story = Engadget Plug

[American AC in Paris]

Phillip, I don't deny that yours is a good article, but in roughly the past half-year you've had 14 articles accepted, every single one of which has plugged Engadget. Of these fourteen articles, the closest you've come to identifying yourself as part of Engadget is the use of "we" in three of these articles. Other times, you've written stuff like "the folks over at Engadget", which infers that you have nothing to do with Engadget. Usually, though, you make no indication one way or another of your relationship with Engadget, which is just generally misleading.

Can you see how some of us suspect you of trolling for hits?

One Liner

[fupeg]

I've had my iPod since 2001 and have often used to transfer songs. It's really quite simple. Just open up a Terminal (on OSX) or Cygwin (on Windows) and browse to your iPod (usually something like /Volumes/"My iPod" or /cygdrive/f.) Then it's just one line :

find . -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {} /temp_folder \;

That will copy all the MP3 files to some temporary place. Then just drop the folder on iTunes (make sure you have the "let iTunes keep your music organized" option turned on) and it will copy everything nice and neatly to your music library.