Andrew Ferguson dot NET

Copy files from your iPod to your computer

01 Mar 2008 @17:58

My friend Jason asks:

how can i transfer music off an ipod that isn’t registered to my computer into my itunes?

I know nobody would ever use this to steal music, so don’t. But to get your own music back, I made a video to show you how:

07 Mar 2008: Daniel (12:42:43) :

Is there a way to do this without losing playlists, ratings and play counts? Yesterday I had to reformat and stored my music on my iPod - so I’ll definitely use this tutorial - but I would hate to lose that extra data.
10 Mar 2008: Andrew Ferguson (00:07:17) :

Searching online, there are some software solutions to get your playlists, ratings, and play counts back. However, all of the ones that I’ve seen want you to pay them money.

I did a bit of snooping, and it looks like iTunes stores all of the above data in a single XML file called: iTunes Music Library.xml.

There is, of course, no such file on the iPod. Instead there is the “iTunesDB’ file. As it turns out, the iTunesDB files is not human-readable (unlike the XML file, which is).

The task then becomes to convert the iTunesDB file into the XML file. And that’s why you have to pay money.
22 Mar 2008: Kate (08:52:38) :

I wanted to put music on my ipod my son gave me but it says ipod dosnt reconize my computer what can I do?
26 Mar 2008: Andrew Ferguson (13:16:16) :

@Kate:

You should contact Apple support: http://www.apple.com/support/