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)
March 17th, 2007 09:49
Mate, you just saved my life with this article. You are a champ.
March 14th, 2007 19:22
Oh my Goodness, if a flippin’ flight attendant can mange it, then all you guys who have not been able to get it to work should be ashamed of yourselves!!!!
Hee hee hee only kidding. I have the utmost respect for male air stewardesses…
March 11th, 2007 10:53
wow. you completely just made my day by writing this article.
thankx
March 11th, 2007 00:32
Thank you very much for this article! Other websites tell you to download a software to transfer music from the ipod to the computer. This is the best and easiest method.
March 4th, 2007 03:12
ok problem.
websites keep telling me to do this, but i cant find my iPod anywhere. i plugged it in, but it doesnt pop up on My Computer. without that, i can’t get to iPod Control folder & can’t get my songs back. please help!
February 28th, 2007 21:59
thnx alot m8. u made my day. cheers to that.i strongly recommend ur website to the rest of my m8s.
February 27th, 2007 00:29
Thank you sooooo much!!! I knew there had to be a way w/out paying $19.95. It worked perfectly. I recomend updating your Windows Media Player before attempting to import files from your Ipod.
February 23rd, 2007 01:53
I copied them to my computer, but when I go to play the songs from the ITUNES library the message “The song could not be found because the original file coud not be found. Whould you like to find it?” When I click Yes, it takes me to the Itunes Library with my old stored songs on my computer, but the new ones listed and trasnferred from the IPOD are not there. Any ideas what I did wrong ???
February 13th, 2007 11:14
thank you very much. I have been looking for this for a very long time now. Ever since my other computer crashed I have been trying to get all of my songs back and not download them all over again(more than 2000 songs). Again Thanks!
February 5th, 2007 08:39
Thanks very much for this information, i tried every thing i couldnt copy the music files but i tried this way i done it perfectly without any problem
January 29th, 2007 07:02
I happened to be reading through these forums (ipod music transfer….) I realize that no one has mentioned another way which i found out for trying to help my friend with his dilemna. This method works for 1- computers with no iTunes and 2- older computers that will not work with the “show hidden files”. You can find everything in your ipod by running a search on your computer and changing search criteria to the Ipod drive, whatever it may be. leave the file name blank and hit search. Every folder on your ipod should come up. With some computers you might have to mess with the search criteria even more such as options and such. you can even connect 2,3,4 ipods and do simultanious searches. From there you can transfer from 1 ipod to another via drag and drop (do this at your own risk) But it is possible, I have done it. Well i hope this helps out at least somebody. It helped my friend who doesnt even own an ipod. I found out by sheer luck, i dont even like ipods, iRiver, iAudio, and Archos all the way.
January 23rd, 2007 00:33
omg thank you soo much this information has saved me hundreds of hours of trying to get all my ipod files onto my new computer.
thanks soo much
January 12th, 2007 06:53
I did this last night, worked perfect and didn’t have to re name any of the files!!!
Thank you so much!!!
January 11th, 2007 16:36
THIS WORKS! I am a flight attendant and have my iTunes on my laptop at home in Seattle, but have all my movies and music on the desktop at the apartment in Newark. This allowed me to load up and go!!
Thank you so much!
and thanks for nothing Apple…
January 10th, 2007 06:36
[...] permalink Hmm, da mir leider immer noch nicht klar ist, warum du über den iPod am PC Musik hören willst, gehe ich mal davon aus, dass du nicht weißt, wie du sie wieder auf den PC bringen kannst. Vll. hilft dir das hier weiter. Falls nicht, dann einfach selbst einmal googeln. @KingAnonym: Sorry, da war ich wohl mal wieder zu schnell Gruß, Julia __________________ MacBook White 2 GHZ – 80 GB – 2 GB Ram *happy* [...]
January 1st, 2007 07:43
I tried other sites and they didn’t work, but finally, when all hope was lost, I found this site and it was so simple. I encourage people to use this method. Thanks so much!!!
December 24th, 2006 17:02
[...] Similar to Apple iPod, Zune restricts or limits user ability to copy, transfer, upload or download of files, especially songs, musics, MP3s and videos between Zune and computer to protect the copyrights and reduce piracy. However, with a little trick and registry hack, you can enable visibility of Zune player in Windows system with limited hard disk support. [...]
December 4th, 2006 21:36
What if I want to copy songs from my computer to iPod…do I also use this method? I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. I have some songs on my work computer that I want to move to my iPod since I can’t install iTunes at work
December 3rd, 2006 13:00
Another entry: As I plow through the process (see previous entry), grey exclamation points appear in front of increasing numbers of songs. The grey exclamation points mean that iTunes cannot find the song. A search returns to the files with the cryptic 4-letter song title. Is this the best there is?
December 3rd, 2006 11:30
The technique is a good one. However, I have an iPod with about 1/6 of some 730 songs not on my computer. I find myself having to click on each song to get it to play thru iTunes, and delete it as I find that it is a duplicate song already on my computer, which is pretty tedious the more songs you have to go through. Even when I switched to “tiles” in Windows Explorer the files kept their cryptic 4-letter file names. Any ideas about how to streamline the process?
November 26th, 2006 14:17
Thanks for the help it was really easy to follow and made the process go fast.
November 24th, 2006 13:49
This was amazing! thank you so much! this helped get all my music back onto my computer after it crashed! im so happy i didnt have to burn a million cds. Thank you again!
November 17th, 2006 07:54
This helped out so much! I’ve been trying to getmy songs from my iPod to my new computer since August, but I haven’t figured it out… until now. Thank you.
November 14th, 2006 11:26
More simple, you can upload song from Ipod from Winamp
Oulios
November 13th, 2006 13:49
you have no idea the grief you saved me by writing this article! after my hard drive crashed, my ipod was the only piece of hardware holding over 15 gb of music. i tried some third party programs to upload the music from my ipod, but these programs (Tansee, IpodRip) kept failing to copy hundreds of my songs. your method worked perfectly, i retrieved every single one of my songs back, and i am extremely grateful for your help! thank you, and keep writing helpful articles like this.