Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's not that first time such 'backup' tool is available, and it's also not the first time Apple found ways to neutralize such tool by way of a new version.
Additionally, it's relatively easy (compared to ripping CDs) to do it on iPod because Apple basically owns the device and its content, and they can do a lot to force users to comply. iPod doesn't need to follow a standard format (like CDs must play in all CD players), they can set/change the format to suit.
The article is quick to point out that "We're also hopeful Apple might consider not spending engineering time and lawyer fees on chasing after applications and developers who just want to give folks an obvious feature that's being left out only to appease the RIAA. At the end of the day, Apple needs to know that we're their customers, too."
However I think the BoingBoing article sums it up nicely - " 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."
When/If these online music distributors have gained enough market shares (maybe 30% of all music album buyers?), they might able to turn around and force the record industry to make changes, because it's not nice to lose 30% sales overnight.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
This is exactly why I go with Archos.
Video, Pictures, and you don't have to do anything illegal to be able to keep your own music.
This story is simply yet another plug for the folks over at Engadget.com, submitted by Mr. Torrone himself. (Hint: he's with Engadget.) They're trolling for hits, plain and simple.
At least grant us the courtesy of a disclosure statement if you're gonna let 'em plug their site under the guise of news.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
story link contains pornographic ads.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would hardly say that Apple trying to protect its relationship with the music content providers, which is the whole reason that the iTunes Music Store exists in the first place, not to mention the online store with by far the highest marketshare, is tantamount to Apple telling its customers to "eat shit and die".
.
His preemptive rebuttals are also complete bullshit. Yes, we're the "customers", not Sony/BMG. And he himself admits that the record companies are idiots; yes, those are the idiots that Apple has to deal with. A lot of people think it was a miracle Apple/Steve Jobs got them even to agree to this "crazy experiment" in the first place.
Additionally, getting music back off the iPod is not part of the advertised capabilities or features of the service, period, and never was. Remember iTunes 4.0b12? It let you go both ways between every iPod and iTunes under the sun, with no limits. You could two-way sync every iPod and iTunes library on earth. Remember iTunes 4.0, and its internet music sharing? The record industry might not be telling Apple *exactly* the specifics of how to implement the protections, but Apple is under pressure to not make it too "easy" to "share" music on a wide scale, while still making the DRM and protections as transparent as it possibly can.
The proponents of things like iPod Download, and even the linked article, talk about things like stolen computers and hard drive failures. Well, in fairness, Apple does have a recommendation. You might hate it, and you might think it sucks, but it's to have your music library backed up somewhere other than your computer, and other than your iPod
Further, as long as the iPod is just a freaking disk, its contents will be able to be retrieved. But Apple CANNOT look as if it is passively ignoring things that are perceived by the music industry to be "dangerous", whether they are or not. Yes, Apple can try to help the music industry understand, and even pressure them in the right direction - and probably has, quite a bit, frankly. Remember, this whole online download thing is in its utter infancy.
If you want to hate or blame Apple for "selling out", and saying that they should just tell people like Sony/BMG to go fuck themselves, and if they lose them they lose them, fine...that's you call. And no one is forcing you to use or buy any of Apple's services. This is Apple's service and products, and they're running them how they feel they have to to ensure the iTunes Music Store's continued existence. Do you think they WANT to make things hard on customers? Quite the opposite! And maybe someday Apple will have the leverage to start pressing these things with the music industry - Jobs believes people should really be able to do what they want with their music. But people also want music from the major labels, so you can't piss them off right off the bat. What to do? Frankly, I think Apple is in the right here, and Cory Doctorow is the one who can eat shit and die.
Just use gtkpod, and copy the music to and from the ipod using a convenient graphical interface. As for resetting the ipod if you've screwed it up with DRM, I find the following command works every time: dd if=ipod_firmware of=/dev/sda1. Not graphical yet, but perhaps in the next version of gtkpod?
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?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
There's also CopyPod for Windows which allows you to select individual albums/songs. http://www.copypod.net/index.php
I think one important aspect to Apple's constant user downgrades of the iPod/iTMs is that they stop customers from doing what Apple tells them to do: Back up their songs.
Oddly, Apple's iTMS wants it both ways. They say they are selling you a license for the song, not the physical song. But when you lose a song, they treat it like you lost physical property, even though you paid an apparently perpetual license fee that allows you to have the song and play it.
If something happens to your iTunes library, Apple will not let you re-download those songs again even though the "Fair Play" DRM insures that their could be no piracy involved, since the songs would be locked to the same computers as the original. Tough luck, says Apple, it's your fault for not backing up. Naturally, one would think that the iPod's large disk drive and auto synch would be the perfect way to back up songs, but the schizophrenic Apple won't let you copy your songs off iPod. (Yes, there are ways, but Apple may close that back door at any time.) iPod owners are constantly having to ask on Forums how to recover their accidentally erased iTMS library from their iPod because Apple doesn't officially allow anyway to copy their songs from your iPod to restore their music. Ridiculous.
Their is literally no customer advantage to the Apple downgrades. And copying your legal songs is not illegal. I'm glad that Corry is staying on this.
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.
What is music when you despise all sound?
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:
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!
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. "
I don't know when we started being so collectively condescending to the average computer user, but there was a time when you might tell a user to copy a file on their computer and reasonably believe they could do it. These days, most people approach the user like you might approach your retarded cousin who was raised by ferrets on a remote island: don't tell them anything, you might frighten or confuse them (unfrozen-caveman-lawyer style).
Personally, I have faith in people, and when someone asks me how to copy files off their iPod, I show them how to do it with the normal shell commands or file manager interfaces. The belief that people need a WYSIWYG GUI application to move files between storage devices is, I think, a result of the incorrect and insulting attitude that developers are so much smarter than their users.
That's not what the article says, the article REFUTES that point, sheesh.
feh. stuff.
What we really need is a how-to instructing geek nation how to get their iPod back after some scumbag stole it!
These days, most people approach the user like you might approach your retarded cousin who was raised by ferrets on a remote island: don't tell them anything, you might frighten or confuse them (unfrozen-caveman-lawyer style).
That's because there are a whole fuckton of people out there who don't know, don't care, and refuse to learn even the most basic thing about computers (like copying files or not clicking on random attachments). The revel in their ignorance. Faced by such willful ignorance, the documentation guys took one step back, gave the one finger salute, and started writing in babytalk, knowing that nobody reads the stuff anyway.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
When I had an ipod, I used EphPod to deal with my music (because iTunes doesn't run on Win ME). EphPod is pretty good on its own, and it has the "feature" that allows you to download from the ipod to your computer. You click and drag. Pretty simple..
You can do it just fine on a PC as well.
I don't know, maybe i'm just completely missing something here, but this article seems incredibly stupid to me. I just don't understand why you'd have to do any of this at all. Why would you not be able to get them off the iPod? In Windows you can press F3 and type *.mp3 in the stupid search box and it will list every MP3 on your iPod and you're free to copy them where-ever you like. You don't need EphPod or a hex editor or any of that, and you never did. -_-
Doesn't all music on an iPod come from a computer? Why not get it from there? The only point I can see to this is the argument of hard drive crash, but there's no need to damn Apple for not providing tools they never said they would.
Just back the files you didn't get from your own CD's to data CD's and be done with it.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
In iTunes, select "Enable FireWire disk use." under iPod Preferences.
Open terminal.Note: this might not be exactly right, as I'm not sitting right in front of Terminal right now. But come on, this isn't exactly rocket science.
Well, the door was open...
Rather than restrict sharing to say, 3 network MAC addresses, they removed the feature altogether.
This seems to be another annoyance for users who just want to stream their iTunes from home to a pals house, or musicians who use the iPod to listen to their own music.
Again, no trouble for those who would like to bypass such restrictions, just a pain in the ass for those who use(d) these features legitimately.
I just bought an Iriver ifp 795 and i can't get music files off it either. You can use it as a hard drive for other types of files but not musics ones, and only through the iriver music manager software. I hope somebody comes up with a hack for iriver products also.
On a Mac, this is fairly simple.
1) Plug in the iPod and make sure it mounts as a disk. Note the name of the disk (it will be whatever you named your iPod, likely John Doe's iPod).
2) Open a new finder window and press cmd-shift-G. In the sheet that opens up, type the following: "/Volumes/John Doe's iPod/iPod_Control/Music"
3) Your finder window will go the the music folder. It will look empty, but it's not. In the folder *above* the music folder, the music folder itself will appear as a greyed out folder. Drag this icon to wherever you'd like to put it. The copy will begin.
4) Once the copy completes, enjoy the music.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
I'm not saying you're lying but my iPod's library is entirely searchable with non-random file names. The file names on my iPod are in the thisisthesongname.mp3 format.
Just mount the iPod in firewire disk mode go searching via the terminal or make sure you set hidden files as viewable in Finder/Explorer.
Or download the handful of GUI apps that will do it for you. Apple disabled an iTunes plugin - not the ability to move files from your iPod.
But it doesn't matter so much for a few reasons. One is that the files still have id3 tags in them.
Another is that if you are backing up the iPod, all it takes is a recursive copy and you are done. Still very useful.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Having just done this myself when I bought a Powerbook overseas when I had my iPod with me and not the laptop that had my music collection I can add my two cents on how to do this fairly easily.
First you can't see the directory the music is stored in by using Finder as Apple disables it but if you open a terminal you can copy all the files across from the mount point.
Yes as you stated this contains a big mess of numerical directories with crappy filenames but all the files are still properly tagged (you do tag your mp3's right?) so iTunes still works perfectly okay if you add these to your library.
After doing that though I consolidated my library and it brought everything back into a sane state with an Artist / Album / song hierarchy automagically then I just deleted what I copied off the iPod.
Quite simple really and with no third party tools or hex editing of anything.
In the drops - An Aussie's musings on all things cycling
You are partially incorrect. It's true that the files are put in random directories, but the filenames remain the same.
/Volumes/iPod ./ -iname *portishead*
./ -iname *portishead*`; do open $i; done
$ cd
$ find
If you wanna get fancy, you can import them by checking the "copy imported music to iTunes" and do:
for i in `find
This will reimport all of your portishead songs. I should know, I just did it because my hard drive died a couple of weeks ago and my backup was bad. This was the only way I could get some of my music back.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
It's like everyone was just waiting around for Apple to do something like this, and now that they've done it, no matter how minisculy important it is, OMFG APPLE IS FORCE-FEEDING US FECES.
There's dozens of programs out there that let you download from an iPod (so many have been linked already that I won't even bother) the one difference between all those and iPod Download? iPod Download is an iTunes plug-in. Is it really a stretch to imagine the RIAA pulling their music from the iTMS (or even suing Apple) when they see iTunes being used for "illegal file sharing"?
Adam
If Microsoft did this, all of Slashdot would be outraged and ranting about evilness and what not.
Apple does it and people come out of the woodwork to defend them and find work-arounds.
Why is buying an Apple iPod is any different than buying an MP3 player laden with Microsoft DRM?
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Sure there are ways to copy the music files from an iPod to a PC or Mac.
It's another ordeal entirely to copy the related Playcounts, Playlists, and groupings from a well-groomed iTunes database.
To get everything, just use iPodRip (PC/Mac).
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Anyone who halfway knows their way around a *nix machine could do this with their eyes closed.
For those of you who do not, enable "Hard Disk Usage" on your ipod via iTunes. Unmount/mount your ipod. Open your terminal and "cd" into the music folder of your ipod, located in your devices directory. Google search how to copy directories in any *nix environment and you're all done.
No need for someone else to write you a pretty GUI, after all you read /. so do it yourself through the terminal.
I boycott signatures
what do /.ers think is the most hackable portable music player? I have a few things that I would love to do with my player, such as making audio "flash cards" for the languages I am learning, along wiht the word printed on the screen(I'm learning Chinese and Japanese, so it would be nice if I could take advantage of the fact that the iPod can render all those characters).
It's pretty obvious it's possible to do this on the iPod, but Apple won't release SDKs for it. Are there any players that will let you program them to achieve such a thing?
Monstar L
Interesting, I have the same experience with people who work at Staples.
http://www.busyweather.com/
My first mp3 player was the Rio500. This device inspired a lawsuit against the maker, Diamond Multimedia, because the RIAA claimed it would enable piracy. The case was thrown out of court, but just to cover their asses from additional legal challenges, Diamond disabled the capability for files to easily be copied from the player back to a computer.
A few months ago I just upgraded and bought an iPod 40gig. I really appreciate it over my Rio500. I am disappointed that I can't easily transfer music from the player to my computer, but I can understand their rationale.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The iTunes information is stored in a "special" way so that's it's not readily displayed on the desktop. You can enable the iPod to also act like a normal firewire drive as well, which you can copy files on and off of, however music you copy on to the iPod this way can't played on the iPod, but can be copied off normally at a different computer.
It's analogous to having two partitions on the iPod, the normal iPod/iTunes parition and the straight up firewire/usb partition. Only music imported through iTunes can be played on the iPod, but any music copied onto the firewire drive can be easily copied off. It's not really two partitions, but that's the general idea.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7463
Open Pod is an applescript for iTunes that builds a playlist from the files on your iPod, which you can then copy to your music library. This thing saved me hours of re-ripping when I deleted all the music from my hard drive to save space, not knowing that I "couldn't" copy the music back from my iPod (I was an iPod newb when this happened). I don't know if this works in Windows. I would guess not...
sudo eat my shorts
I've never had a problem getting the songs off of my iPod, especially since I use iTunes to organize my music. The music is just stored in a hidden directory on the iPod, so all you have to do is copy that directory, and then tell iTunes (or any other good jukebox) to import a directory. Tada! Music transferred. It's not like Apple made it really difficult to remove it.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
Yes, the iPod is an external drive, and you can see your music (if you enable hidden files and folders), but it is not organized well at all. There are folders like F01 through F19, each one containing a portion of your library. There is a file which contains the entire database of your playlists, and how they map to the files - it is this mapping that the programs exploit, making it useful to view your songs as "artist - title", by playlist, and copy off in that fashion.
Sure, you could just copy F19/*.mp3, if you want. Then you could re-create all of your playlists. There are just easier ways.
If this were truly about restoring your music after a catastrophic computer failure, you would not need any of these tools. You would just need a simple script that is something along the lines of:
/Volumes/myIpod -name *.mp3`
mkdir ~/Desktop/restoredMusic
for FILE in `find
do
cp ${FILE} ~/Desktop/restoredMusic
done
(Another couple lines would do this for every filetype supported by the iPod)
All metadata is stored in the ID3 tags, so if you drag the entire contents of the new folder into iTunes you will have all your music back.
The only reason to use iPod Download or iPodRip or any of those add-on programs are if you want some of the music, but not all the music off of an iPod. Let's face it, when you want to do that you are most likely taking music off of a friend's iPod. I expect plenty of responses about obscure use cases where you want some but not all of your music on your work or wife's computer. I know those cases exist, but I would say they account for 2% of the actual usage of the program, and there are probably easy workarounds for all of them.
I'm no saint, and I freely admit I have used these programs before. However, I am not into pretending to be the victim of mean old Apple.
hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) formerly called PlayFair - Removes Apple's FairPlay DRM from iPod / iTunes http://hymn-project.org/
nuff said.
It has already been clearly established that the iPod is not a 'backup' medium and it is not acceptable to store the 'only' copies of your music on it. Quite regularly, answers in Apple's troubleshooting tips for iPod problems instruct the user to restore the Pod, which returns it to the completely empty default-install state.
So why would anyone be silly enough to keep the only copies of their music on their iPod, forcing them to then use this tool? With iTunes, you can't even get music onto the Pod without first importing it into the library. So it's a given that the music is already on your computer. (And where did it come from? If absolutely necessary, you can re-rip your CDs, or copy from your burned backups for iTMS or illegal music downloads.)
So tell me, is there a legitimate reason for your only copy of any song to be exclusively stored on your iPod?
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 :
/temp_folder \;
find . -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {}
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.
The only problem with doing a copy like that is that it doesn't bring across your playlists, play counts or ratings. Also, songs that are .wav's do not have their meta data brought across as they cannot contain any.
Neither of the programs listed in the article seem to do either, and as a developer of this exact type of software, I know how valuable it can be.
Here are some of the options I find worthy (Mac OS X only):
- iPodRip - I wrote this, so it is a plug for me. Recovers everything. Ten unrestricted uses, so feel free to download it, recover and delete it.
- PodWorks - Cheaper than iPodRip but it contains restrictions. Does not recover all meta data.
- Senuti - Does not recover playlists or any meta data. Free, although if you wanted to recover for free, simply use iPodRip and throw it away.
In the end for most users it is all about ease of use and trust. You can't ask the developer of terminal or the Unix command line for assistance, but you can ask the developer of an application. You also may not feel safe in a CLI, where as a GUI can provide that comfort zone. Those apps only require a single button press and that gives users peace of mind.
So I encourage... someone... to turn the binary patching stuff into a nice, easy perl script. :-)
Has anyone considered that Apple actually made it rather easy to do this?
Had they been the real evil corporation that Apple-haters tend to want to cast them as, they could quite easily have arranged for something like byte scrambling to take place as the music tracks transferred from iTunes to the iPod.
Then, getting the data back to the computer from an iPod would have been a lot harder.
It reminds me of the early days of DVD players:
Haha whoa whoa..easy there, fellah. I never professed that I was holier than thou or a superior user.. I'm just saying that you have to start off assuming that people know nothing about computers because they generally don't know anything. If anyone wants to come in and talk at a higher level, I am always available. But take it from someone who works retail: most people (AKA Joe User) know nothing, if not very little, about computers. Also, there's no need to insult my job. I realize it is shitty and I never claimed it to be great. I'm only 21 and I'm still in college. At least I'm working and not doing drugs like half of the population my age.
HAHAHAHAHA
True, true.
One of my co-workers once said to a customer: "If you use a switch as opposed to a router, you have to use crossover cables on all of the computers."