Ever wanted to transfer music from your friends iPod to your computer? Have you ever lost all of the music on your computer and left with an iPod whose music you can’t copy? If your answer is ‘Yes’ to any of these questions then you need to follow the steps detailed in this article. I found a nifty little program by the name of Music Rescue (it used to go by PodUtil) which allows you to connect to your iPod and retrieve all of your music and copy it to your computer. Description from site follows.
Disaster Insurance
Your music library is precious. It contains all those memories of your youth, or that first dance. With an iPod, it helps you work out, keeps you company when you drive and drowns out that noisy train ride into the city. Unfortunately, your music library is fragile. If your computer dies and takes your music with it, you still have your iPod, right? However, iTunes only lets you transfer tracks bought from the iTunes Store back to your new/fixed computer. What about those tracks ripped from CD, or lovingly recorded from your vinyl collection?
Enter Music Rescue – the answer to your nightmare
Your Music. Anywhere.
As you have your music library on your computer at home, and keep it on you when you’re out and about with your iPod, you’ll probably want to listen to it at work. Or your dorm. Or anywhere you regularly use a computer. With Music Rescue, you can copy your tracks to the other machine. If you’re not allowed to install iTunes (school and corporate networks tend to not like this), simply install Music Rescue onto your iPod at home and it’ll be available wherever you go – Mac or PC.
Instructions on copying music from your iPod below
1. Before installing this software I highly recommend you enable disk use for your iPod from the iTunes interface, if you don’t know how to do this follow Step 2, otherwise continue to Step 3.
2. To enable disk use, plug in your iPod, in the iTunes summary page for your iPod under Options, place a checkmark next to "Manually manage music and videos" and "Enable disk use", sync and save these settings.
Configuring your iPod in this way will prevent Itunes from bombarding you with the "…want to erase this iPod…" dialog box and allow Music Rescue to access your iPod.
3. Download and install Music Rescue – Mac | Windows
4. Once installed plug in your iPod to your computer and run Music Rescue (You will notice that the software resembles iTune’s interface)
5. In order to copy your music you need to first select what you would like to copy, any music track with a tick by it’s name is in the Copy Queue, meaning it will be copied. If you want to copy all of your music then go to Edit > Select All, then tick a music track – all the music tracks will be selected.
6. Once you’ve selected what you want to copy you must then choose a destination for all of your music tracks, click the Choose… button in the copy settings area at the bottom of the window, and select a folder to copy your music into.
7. After selecting the music you wish to copy and assigning a destination, you then need to determine how you want music rescue to name and sort your music. Click on Edit… from the Sorting Presets: menu. Alternately you can just have Music Rescue rebuild your play lists and add your tracks to iTunes, simply click on Add Track to iTunes and Rebuild Play lists boxes.
Please note this software has all of the functionality of the registered version, so if you find this software useful and intend to use it beyond testing, then support the author and pay for it.
