Copy or Transfer Music and Songs from iPod to PC and Computer without iTunes
To protect the copyrights of the songs, musics and videos stored on iPod and reduce piracy, Apple has make it difficult to copy or transfer the songs, musics, audio, videos and files that stored on iPod to personal computer (PC) or laptop notebook computer, by scrambling the file names of the songs on the iPod and telling the operating system that the files should be invisible to normal users, without any encryption involved in this iPod anti-copying mechanism.
iTunes allows only one-way synchronization of musics from computer to iPod, so if for whatever reasons such as need to reload your library on local hard disk due to desktop hard disk failure or buying new computer, you can easily copy back the video, music and song library from iPod on a Windows PC by following steps:
- Insert your iPod to a Windows PC USB or FireWire port. (PC should runs Windows XP or other Windows operating system).
- If your Windows PC still doesn’t have iTunes installed, skip this step. If iTunes is already installed and prompt a message on whether if you’d like to associate this iPod with this computer and deleting its content, click No. Or else you will lose your only copy of library on iTunes. Beside, ensure that ‘Enable Disk Use’ is selected.
- Open My Computer or Windows Explorer, the iPod should be automatically detected as a portable hard drive.
- Click on the iPod icon or the iPod portable hard drive letter to open the contents of the drive.
- If you don’t see a folder called “iPod Control”, it’s hidden and invisible. To unhidden it so that it’s visible, go to Tools -> Folder Options -> View, and then check (enable) the option “Show hidden files and folders.”
- Open the “iPod Control” folder, and then the Music folder.
- The Music folder contains the iPod’s music and videos, divided into folders. Copy the library to local computer hard drive’s My Music folder.
- The files copied have unintelligible four-letter file names. To reveal the names of the songs and other data tags, add the files to the Windows Media Player or iTunes libraries or switch to “Tiles” view in Windows Explorer.
- Rename the file if necessary.
Beside above manual ways to copy and transfer song library from iPod to computer, or import into iTunes, there are several third party program or more commonly called iPod Manager that has the iPod copying function such as SharePod (freeware) or PodPlus (shareware).
Similarly, in Macintosh running MacOS X or MacOS 9, it’s harder to show hidden files and folders. So these third party utilities with iPod copying will be useful to transfer files and music from iPod to PC’s hard disk and iTunes library.
For MacOS X, try Broken Helix and Rob’s iPod Exporter. For MacOS 9, try escapePod and iProber. Other iPod Manager or iPod song transfer utility for Mac include Senuti, iPodRid, iPod.iTunes and PodWorks. For Linux, try GUIPod. PodUtil will be able to works on both Windows and Mac platform.
The transferred music will be playable without any restrictions if the songs are ripped from CDs. If the songs or videos are bought from the iTunes music store, they will play in iTunes after you have “authorize” the computer. To authorize, try playing a purchased file. It will prompt you for your iTunes username and password. Up to five computers can be authorized at any one time.
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Entries (RSS)
July 4th, 2009 10:42
geeeee!! thanks!!! really really thanks!!!!
July 1st, 2009 20:40
Ok I am stuck at the check the ’show hidden files and folders’ when I press the apply button and then ‘OK’ the folder doesn’t appear. I go back into the view section and the button has been unchecked.. how do I keep it checked?
July 1st, 2009 10:22
Holy Monkey Craps it worked! THANK YOU
July 1st, 2009 09:47
it worked!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yayyyyy
June 26th, 2009 20:54
thank u,thank u,thank u.
YOU are a life saver!!!it just saved ALLL of my music and my reputation!!;-)!!
thanks agen,
xoxo~!
June 16th, 2009 22:09
DUDE damn you are the man
June 15th, 2009 08:59
I can’t believe it was that easy! You ROCK!
June 14th, 2009 02:23
all your program did was disable my itunes. Thanks alot. The music is on my computer, and I can listen in windows media player but now I can’t access my itunes or listen to my music that way. I can’t put anything on my ipod now. Your program is crap
June 8th, 2009 21:22
Mine didnt work.. maybe bcuz im using a ipod touch?
June 7th, 2009 00:57
Hey there!! Thanks so much for this article, it saved me so much grief its unbelievable. This simple method is so quick and easy and enabled me to restore over 20gb of music to my computer after it crashed and had to be formatted!
Thanks again, and please keep writing!
June 5th, 2009 09:05
hi, we were in for a long journey and i was wondering how to use my amazing ipod collection while on the drive… you just saved our drive. thanks a ton!
June 3rd, 2009 00:24
thankss soooo much for this article soo help full im using my sisters ipod an i had her music which i wanted to keep an my music i wanted to upload although it deleted the playlists but atlest i got the music
May 26th, 2009 09:30
holy shit this was incredible
May 25th, 2009 05:51
Thank you so much!!! It really works!!
May 24th, 2009 19:30
YHANK YOU SOO FREAKING MUCH!!!
SAVED MY LIFE
!!!
I HAD ABT 500 SONGS IN MY IPOD AND I HAD TO REFORMAT MY PC SO I LOST ALL OF THEM ON D PC….DINT KNW HOW TO GET my songs bk!!!
THANK YOU!!!
May 10th, 2009 06:10
Thank you very much seems to be working like a charm, just lost my HD and was worried I would have to aquire all this music again. Thanks alot!
May 9th, 2009 13:41
i get up to opening the ipod but i cant find where the(Tools -> Folder Options -> View) are pleaseee helppp
May 4th, 2009 21:35
Ok im new. I got a new computer and I used it to rename cryptic 4 letter words songs in ipod control to original songs on my ipod nano. I’d done this before on my old computer and they still worked. Now I did it on my new computer and the renamed songs stopped working. I renamed another one and it stopped working. Then I renamed it back to the original four letter file name and it worked on my ipod again. Great. Now I wish I knew how to change the renamed filenames back to their old four letter names. I tried properties n resests, Itunes, restore, the whole nine yards I got nothing. The only way to make it work again is by changng it back to the original cryptic 4 letter word. PLz help.
April 30th, 2009 03:52
Hi. I’m trying to upload my iPod content to a media player on a website. Is there an EASIER way of doing this without using Zip files.? Isn’t there some kinda drag n drop program somewhere on this internet that would allow me to do this.? If not, WHY not.?!!?
April 28th, 2009 00:36
I LOVE YOU
my home pc crashed, so i ended up re-downloading every one of nearly 1000 songs, then my laptop recently crashed and i lost all my songs again
but then came accross this and it has worked perfectly
thankyou so much
April 23rd, 2009 08:13
I forgot to say that The iPod doesn’t show up on the computer at all unless I enter the passcode, which I can’t…
April 23rd, 2009 08:09
I got a new hard drive, and the only place my music is backed up is my ipod.
The iPod randomly stopped working, and got stuck on a screen that has the USB cable pointing to the itunes icon, and telling you to connect to iTunes.
I connected it, and iTunes says that it can’t use the iPod until I enter the passcode (when you turn it) into the iPod, and i can’t do even that because it’s stuck on the screen that says to connect to iTunes.
That means I can’t use any software, or even this method to get the 2500 songs I have on my iPod.
Help!!! Thanks!
April 23rd, 2009 07:34
Where do I “Enable disk use?” On itunes, ipod?
April 21st, 2009 10:54
omg..I can’t thank u enough..I lost all my music files except those on ipod..
April 13th, 2009 20:54
omg..there’s something wrong with my ipod touch or pc?
because when i plugged it in my pc, my pc read my ipod as a scanner/camera and it only says “Apple ipod” and i can’t view the contents of my ipod. pls help?