Through some stupid moves on my part, I now have a trashed Mac and an iPod that is full of music. Problem is, every time I hook up the iPod to any other computer, iTunes promptly wants to empty it and reformat it, which would stink because i have tons of music and even some movies on the unit. Help!
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.
if you have a Mac, use “SharePod” in your applications folder.
My favorite is iPodDisk. It mounts the ipod like a drive with all the albums and artists. By far the best in my opinion.
here is a step on how to copy ipod to computer.Please connect me.
Yes, the program is called share pod for PC and is a small stand-alone application.
I have used Senuti with my iMac. However, I also have an iPod which was formatted on my PC. I would like to transfer the movies (mp4) from that iPod to my PC, then burn them to a CD/DVD and then copy them onto my iMAC where I will then reformat the iPod and return the movies to the iPod. Is there a Senuti like program for the PC?
Richard
how do i do that on a pc
How do I do all of that with a different computer? I don’t have a MAC
I agree that musicians need to make a living but what some of them get is stupid and instead of being nice, they’re complete arses and treat everyone like something on the bottom of their shoe. Some artists deserve their music to be pirate if my opinion.
There is an easy way to backup the ipod: In Disk Utility one can make an image of the ipod like one can do from any (removable) drive. It workds like a charm and when extracting it to the MAc it appears as….. the ipod itself !!! Have fun !!
Jaap