HOW-TO: Get music OFF your iPod

Engadget ^ | Posted Nov 2, 2004, 1:16 PM ET | Phillip Torrone

[martin_fierro]

HOW-TO: Get music OFF your iPod

Posted Nov 2, 2004, 1:16 PM ET by Phillip Torrone

Never did we think we’d need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately it’s a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. There are already a lot of different ways to copy music off of an iPod, Apple is just choosing to spend a lot of time and resources to make it hard to do. In this How-To we show you several different ways of getting the music off of your iPod and onto both Macs and PCs, all with free tools.

Why do we need to get our files off our iPod?

It would be a wonderful thing to know we’ll never have a hard drive failure, a system crash with data loss or our computer stolen, but that’s not reality. In our world, those things happen and once you’ve spent the time, money and effort to put music on your iPod, there isn’t any reason it should be locked away. We’ve needed to do a fresh install of the operating system for every computer we have ever owned (yes, including Macs), and sooner or later plenty of users will need to do the same, either because of a physical defect which requires new hardware, or to eliminate any of the spyware, viruses, and other exploits which are part of the computing experience these days. Back-ups are great, but we can’t always back-up our entire library of music. And besides, why should we, it’s our music on our iPod?

Last week we posted our observation that the new new version of iTunes 4.7 disabled a popular and useful utility called “iPod Download” which lets you drag and drop files from the iPod to anywhere you choose. Apple added some blocking code to stop the plug-in from working, and later in this How-To we’ll show you how to enable “iPod Download” with a HexEditor in the Mac section.

All that said, Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing made a couple posts about the current vibe he’s getting from Apple, and we echo the same thoughts (check out his thoughts here and here). Cory also suggested a tool for Macs to get files off, we’ll have that in the Mac section of this How-To as well.

We wanted to explain all of this, since we received more than than a few emails and a lot of instant messages from people discovering they couldn’t just get their stuff off their iPod.

We’re also hopeful Apple might consider not spending engineering time and lawyer fees on chasing after applications and developers who just want to give folks an obvious feature that’s being left out only to appease the RIAA. At the end of the day, Apple needs to know that we’re their customers, too.

On with the How-To. We picked a couple of free tools that help you get your music off your iPod, there might be better ones that we missed, so feel free to post them up in the comments.

Get the tunes off with a PC

On the PC side we picked like the full-featured (and free) ephPod. ephPod can download news, get Outlook contacts, edit your calendar, add songs and few dozen other useful things—but for us, the best feature is a simple file export to get your songs off your iPod. The PC does not need to be the authorized machine for your iPod.

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[martin_fierro]

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[Oystir]

Unfortunately, this article is one year old.

[Petronski]

The title seems a little unclear, but I think I get it. You don't mean "how to remove them," you mean "how to retrieve them."

[seastay]

Talk about loosing data, I had an Ipod until I dropped it, didn’t realize the hard drive was not solid state and just dropping it on the carpet would ruin it These things are over rated, there are other devises that work just as well or better and would be more reliable and, don’t need a software package that has other motivations such as trying ot take over your PC . For just a bit larger a and a whole lot cheaper, by a factor of 10 just get a portable cd player capable of playing mp3s cdrs….And regarding video iPOd, great, now we have to look forward to the same as what MTV did to good music…all over again, music is meant to be heard, anything else is not music!

[tubebender]

I sent this to my Granddaughter and I'm sure she can translate for me... :o)

[martin_fierro]

Thanks for pointing that out, Cap'n Obvious.

[martin_fierro]

The title seems a little unclear, but I think I get it. You don't mean "how to remove them," you mean "how to retrieve them."

You'd have to ask the author, but I believe that's the gist of it, yes.

[marblehead17]

ping

[satchmodog9]

They are really that fragile? My wife wants one, but she is really clumsy. She dropped our cordless phone in the sink yesterday.

[My2Cents]

Yeah, I read the headline and thought, "It's easy: just highlight and hit 'clear.'"

[BipolarBob]

I thought about getting an IPod but they don't have the music pre-loaded. They should have different genres of music pre-loaded to save me the consumer from having to pirate buy the music and load it. It's all about convenience these days.

[seastay]

she must be like me, I drop everything !

[Reaganesque]

A really powerful electro-magnet will do the trick. Try running it through the nearest MRI scanner. That'll do'er.

[Yossarian]

If that's the case, buy her an iPod nano, or the barest-bone one, the iPod shuffle. Both are totally solid-state, using Flash-RAM rather than a hard drive.

When the nano was introduced, a website put one to the durability test by dropping it, tossing it up in the air to land on pavement, tossing it out of a car, and finally running it over with a car. Only after being run over did the nano finally give up the ghost.

The nano comes in 2 and 4 GB sizes (500 or 1000 songs), and the Shuffle comes in 512 MB or 1 GB sizes (125 or 250 songs).

[martin_fierro]

TO DISPLAY/COPY MUSIC FILES FROM YOUR IPOD TO YOUR PC RUNNING WINDOWS XP:

1. First make sure that Windows XP is displaying hidden files & folders.
   • To display hidden files and folders:
     • Open Folder Options in Control Panel.
     • Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.
     • Double-click Folder Options.
     • On the View tab, under Hidden files and folders, click Show hidden files and folders.
2. Second, after connecting your iPod to your PC:
   • Click on "My Computer" and open the ipod folder.
   • If you've correctly set Windows XP to display hidden files/fonders, a folder called "iPod_Control" will appear there. Open the "iPod_Control" folder and then open a folder called "Music" located there.
   • In the "Music" folder are a bunch of folders labelled "F00", "F01" etc. Your music files are placed randomly in these.
   • To copy a music file from your iPod to your PC, just drag the files into another folder on the computer.
     • Sometimes the original file name appears, making identifying the song easy.
     • But other of your music files in the folders labelled "F00", "F01" etc. have been assigned other, random file names. While the music is still playable after you've copied it from your iPod to your PC, you will have to rename the files so that they're more recognizable.

[SamAdams76]

Get a portable CD player? You've got to be kidding. That's the whole appeal of an iPod - to get away from using those awkward, skip-prone CDs. And even with a CD of MP3s, you still will not be able to setup playlists, which again, is a major feature of organizing all your music digitally. And this would only work if you music collection consisted of about 200 tracks or less. Otherwise, you'll be swapping CDs constantly on an oversized player and having to tote around a bunch of CDs. An awful solution. That is so 1995, as my teenage sons would say.

Drop any hard drive on a carpet and you risk ruining it. However, I've dropped my iPod a few times, including into a puddle of water on a cement street, and it has survived. I do keep it in a leather case at all times.

As for the "video" iPod, who cares? It's all about the audio. Even Apple is only marketing the video functionality on the new iPods as an "extra." As an audio player, the new iPods simply have no peer.

[seastay]

No I am not kidding Ipod is $500 and an MP3 CD player is what $50? While my teenager may agree with yours, CD players may not fit in their pocket; the price fits better in the pocket book!

[SamAdams76]

$500 iPods? Where are you paying that kind of money? iPods now run from $99 to $299.

[seastay]

ok an MP3CD player can now cost 10 to 30 $ too, still 10 to 1 difference.

I just think the hype is over the top, there are other mp3 players just as good. I will admit I am biased since i feel the same way about the macs.

Maybe when the price goes down, by 3 and the reliability down goes up by another factor of 3 , paying extra for something that adds smaller size and more songs would be worth it to me. But I agree, our kids wont settle for anything less, but maybe cause they never had to walk three miles to school barefoot in the snow!