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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I love tech, but don’t have as much time or money to spend on it as I’d like. I get what I need to sustain my Geek vicariously through other sources and pass it along to you.
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Thank you !!!
your a winner forsure
I cannot move the file/folder of iPod_Control to iTunes. It won’t copy or do anything.
it gave me troubles to… remember that you only need the folder inside the iPod_Control called Music, not the whole folder.
And you’ve got to make sure you “unhide” the files in the music folder… I have Windows Vista and had to google how to do it. But once I figured it out, I was able to go into iTunes and add the folder just like he described above.
Thank you so much! Very helpful :)
It took me a bit to figure it out with Windows Vista, but it was basically a matter of figuring out how to unhide the files and it worked like a charm! I’m so thrilled!
I thought I’d have to buy one of those stupid programs to do it and now I don’t have to!
Thanks for the free info! A+++
(And yes, my old computer crashed and my music was all legal! I just wanted all my music back!)
hey, so i wanted to ask, how did you find out how to unhide the files? because that is where i am stuck right now. Please any help?
Thank you! This worked for me, too. Just a reminder as some of the other posts mentioned – once you copy the Music folder to your desktop, check this folder’s properties to make sure Hidden is unchecked, otherwise iTunes won’t be able to add the folder to library.
Hello
So I figured out how to get all the song names onto the Itunes library, however, when i click on a song, an exclamation mark comes up with a message syaing that the file could not be found…would you like to locate it?
how do solve this problem?
Thanks for sharing this Christopher.
My brother gave me his bigger ipod to replace my little Nano. but when I bring the ipod songs onto the computer and into my itunes, will it REPLACE my current library (in other words, will it erase all songs i now have in my itunes library?) I have songs in my current libaray that I dont want to lose when i transfer his songs to my computer, Thanks!
If you want to merge both libraries, you will have to use a third party software, i’m afraid. That will let you copy play count and ratings and other goodies also, which isn’t bad, after all. My experience tells TuneAid did that job pretty well for me, but there are many others (see this guide, for example).
What if my ipod will still not show up in “my computer”?
For others who have trouble, my folder would not copy into iTunes (even after having copied it onto my hard drive). So instead I manually copied each file into my iTunes which ended up working perfecting. Took a lot longer, but still worked.
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