How can I copy music and videos from an Apple iPod?

You're by no means the first person to find problems with the half-hearted digital rights management (DRM) that Apple uses with its iPod and iTunes software to sidestep the little devices being music copying tools. For many uses, that's great, but when you get into a pickle like you're talking about, well, then it's your worst enemy.

Fortunately, Mac software developers have been hard at work and utilities like Senuti can actually make copying data off your old iPod onto your computer a breeze. Basically you'll copy everything onto your Mac, let iTunes reformat the iPod and "pair" with it, drag and drop all of the old stuff into iTunes, then copy it back onto your iPod, good as new.

Doubtless when you plug in your iPod you get this scary message:

Needless to say, do not click on "Erase and Sync", whatever you do! In fact, don't click on anything. Just let iTunes show you that dialog box while you launch Senuti. Here's what you'll see:

You can simply select everything here, or you might just want a subset of the files to drop onto your computer. Everything in "Library" and "iTunes", by the way, are files on your computer, not on the iPod, so ignore those. The iPod data in this screenshot starts with "Biz Vids" and goes all the way down to "U2".

I just want to grab Hawaiian artist Henry Kapono's splendid Dukes on Sunday album, which I do by selecting all the tracks and clicking the downward arrow on the top right. Senuti then copies those music files onto my computer:

That's pretty easy, isn't it? To copy a movie, just find it in Senuti, select it, and again click on the copy button:

Here you can see I am grabbing a copy of The Incredibles, which proves pretty small because it's in the older, smaller video format from the iTunes store, a size that's good for the tiny iPod screen, but definitely not so good for a computer screen.

When you're done copying what you want off the iPod, quit Senuti, go to iTunes and click "Cancel" then eject the [untouched!] iPod and unplug it. Check your iPod: it should have everything in the right place and no idea that you just grabbed a few files off.

The only puzzle is where Senuti drops files and it turns out that they're all in your Music folder, as you can see here:

Since the video doesn't have artist and album information, it gets "Unknown Artist" and "Unknown Album" values, but that's okay. Just grab album folders and the actual movie files themselves and drop 'em onto the "Library" in iTunes:

Let iTunes import everything and you're good to go! Here's Henry Kapono's album in my library, for example:

In fact, the .mp4 file we grabbed of The Incredibles is a standalone file and can be easily opened and enjoyed in Quicktime:

That should give you a major push in the right direction. Hopefully you'll be able to recover your iPod content and get it all repaired with your new computer now.