iPod Tips for Mac OS Users

Has a virus or hard drive crash wiped out your entire music collection on your computer? No problem. Here's how to copy music off your iPod or iPhone and back onto your computer.
Requirements:

• Any iPod or iPhone
• A computer with iTunes installed and enough hard drive space to store all the media from your iPod/iPhone

Imagine that you have a HUGE music and video library and all of it is kept on your trusty PC or Mac. You of course have a fantastic speaker system, to listen to that music in the highest quality, and an iPod or iPhone, so that you can listen to your music wherever you go. Now imagine that one day, your computer's hard drive crashes, and that music library is now gone. All of the music imported off of CD's which you might have lost by now, all of the music downloaded off of free-music web sites, and most importantly, all that money spent in the iTunes Store has just vanished!

Then you remember that all your music and movies are still on your iPod, safe and intact. You plug it in, you mount it to the OS, and then you realize that iTunes only allows the downloading of music from iTunes to iPod, not iPod to iTunes. (This is to prevent the stealing of music, says Apple). Do you really want to spend hours re-importing music, and repurchasing music from the iTunes Store? We didn't think so.

Luckily for you, here's how to rip media off your iPod/iPhone and copy it back to your computer.

The Cheaper Way

There are many free or shareware applications for both Mac and PC that will copy content off your iPod or iPhone. Mac users can use iPod Viewer or iPodRip. UNIX Savvy Macintosh and Linux users can use command line to pull the music off their iPod. PC users should look for applications like iPOD AGENT or CopyTrans.

No matter what program you use, this is the general "ripping" procedure for coping the music off your iPod:

With a Helper Application:

1. Download a "ripping" program (PodUtil, PodWorks, etc.) and install it on your computer.

2. Make a new folder somewhere on your computer that will have enough hard drive space to hold all the music files from your iPod.

3. Using the ripping application you purchased or downloaded, copy all the music off your iPod and put it into that folder.

4. It's a good idea to archive your music at this point. Burn all your music onto CDs, DVD-ROMs, or copy them onto USB hard drive.

5. Drag that folder into the main iTunes window. You music will then import into iTunes. This make take several minutes depending on the amount of songs and your computer's processing power.

Without a Helper Application:

Here's a way to quickly get files off a PC iPod without any extra software.

1. Plug in your iPod.
2. From the Desktop, go to My Computer and find the iPod (usually designated by a drive letter. i e. E: or F:)
3. Open the damn thing.
4. Go to Tools > Folder Options > View (the tab) > scroll to Show Hidden Files and Folders and click it.
5. Click OK
6. Go back to your iPod folder/drive, there you will find a new folder called iPod_Control
7. Open it.
8. The Music folder in it will have a bunch of folders named F00, F01 and so on. THEY HAVE YOUR MP3s. Look through the folders to find your stuff.

More Tips:

How to put FLV, WMV, MOV, MKV, AVI, etc to iPod on Mac?

How to rip DVD to iPod on Mac?