How to recover music from your iPod
A friend of mine’s PC has died and along with it his iTunes library. He still has the music on his iPod and wanted to know if/how he could recover the files. The good news is that you can, although it is a little bit fiddly.
NOTE - you must follow the instructions exactly.
Manual Approach (files only - you would lose playlists, ratings, etc)
- Make sure you have installed the current version of iTunes (7.x)
- Connect your iPod to your PC - when asked if you want to sync select ‘Cancel’ - failure to do this will DELETE all your music
- Under iPod options - select ‘Enable Hard Disk Use’ (ignore the warning)
- Under Preferences (Menu - Edit, Preferences) go to the Advanced tab and select ‘Keep iTunes Music Folder Organised’ and ‘Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to Library’ and hit OK
- Close iTunes - Apply the change
- Open Windows Explorer - go to My Computer - you should see your iPod as a drive letter (eg E: F: G:)
- Hit F3 or the Search button to searchSelect ‘All files and folders’
- File name is ‘*.m??’ - that is all files which are mp3 (standard music files) or m4a (Apple AAC music files)
- Look in ‘My Ipod (E:)’ or whatever your iPod is called
- Click on ‘More Advanced Options’ - select ‘Search hidden files and folders’
- You should see a bunch of files with strange filenames
- Select them all (Ctrl-A or Menu - Edit, Select All)
- Copy them (Ctrl-C or Menu - Edit, Copy)
- Create a new folder on your desktop (Music)
- Paste the files (Ctrl-V or Menu - Edit, Paste)
- Open iTunes and hit ‘Cancel’ when prompted to sync
- Resize the iTunes window so you can see your ‘Music’ folder on the desktop
- Drag the ‘Music’ folder onto iTunes
- You should now see it copying the songs
- If you have bought any music from iTunes you will need to authorise your computer (Menu - Store, Authorise Computer). If you can, you should also de-authorise your old computer (you can authorise up to 5, and can reset this once a year)
- You’re done!
I tried some free software to do this for you, iPodRip for Windows - but it didn’t work… There’s also iPodSoft, which I haven’t tried because it costs $10