Transfer Songs from iPod to Your Computer

Apple makes it very easy to sync your music from your computer to your iPod.  Just plug it in and away it goes.  But what if you want to pull the music from your iPod onto your computer?  By default, Apple doesn’t want you doing this.  The obvious reason is illegal file sharing.

There are perfectly legal reason for wanting to do this, however. What if your hard drive crashes? The music might be gone from the computer, but it still exists on your iPod. Grabbing it off the iPod would be a simple solution, and would save a lot of time and money, but Apple won’t let you do it.

There are dozens of third party solutions that will copy the music off your iPod. Some are free, but most cost ten or twenty bucks, maybe more. 

I’m sure the third party software works fine and does the job wonderfully.  But if you don’t want to spend the money, or even bother trying to find a free alternative, there’s a way to get the music off your iPod with no extra software.  All you need is Windows, iTunes, and your iPod.

Note: I’ll work on a Mac version of this tutorial soon.

1. First of all, you want to make sure your iPod is set to be used in Disk Mode. This can be set in iTunes on the iPod Info page.  If you’re doing this in a fresh installation of iTunes (as would be the case if recovering from a failed hard drive) make sure you click “Cancel” when it asks you want to sync the iPod to the library and replace everything on the iPod. This will erase the music off your iPod, which is the opposite of what you want to do.



2. Once this is set, open My Computer (Windows Explorer) and go to the Tools menu, Folder Options. On the “View” tab, make sure “Show Hidden Files and Folders” is selected; click OK.
3. Still in Windows Explorer, find your iPod. It should be listed with a drive letter. Since we enabled disk use, it’s basically treated like any other USB external hard drive. In fact, you can use your iPod to store anything you want. But what we’re looking for is the iPod_Control folder. In this folder will be a Music folder. Drag this to your hard drive; the iTunes folder would be ideal, but ultimately it doesn’t matter.  If you look inside the Music folder, you’ll see a bunch of oddly named folders and files; this is your music collection.  But don’t worry, we’ll get this all sorted out.
4. Once the Music folder is copied to your hard drive, go into iTunes and from the File menu, choose “Add Folder to Library…” In the new dialog window, find the folder you copied over from your iPod; click OK. iTunes should now populate your library with all of your music.
5. In the Preferences window, on the Advanced tab, make sure “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” is checked. Now iTunes will automatically move and rename all those oddly named folders and files that were stored on the iPod.

That should do it.  You won’t have your Play Counts or Ratings, but that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it?  If you have a general idea of what some of your play counts were, you can use the Adjust Play Count script I blogged about a couple weeks ago.

Tagged as: ipod, itunes, music, tutorial