How to Get Music Off Your iPod

ptorrone writes "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. Here's how to get your stuff off for free on a Mac or PC and how to re-enable a useful tool with a Hex editor." Cory Doctorow has been writing about this on boingboing recently; he discusses Apple's message to iPod owners.

WARNING NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

[minus_273]

story link contains pornographic ads.

Far simpler way (on a Mac)

[SuperKendall]

On a Mac it's pretty easy to get everything off the iPod - fire up a shell, wander into the directory where the music is stored on the mounted iPod, and simply copy out what you want.

The tool they talk about would make it easier but even a novice can use a shell if they are just following directions.

Alternatively

[lakeland]

Just use gtkpod, and copy the music to and from the ipod using a convenient graphical interface. As for resetting the ipod if you've screwed it up with DRM, I find the following command works every time: dd if=ipod_firmware of=/dev/sda1. Not graphical yet, but perhaps in the next version of gtkpod?

What the fuck?

[MoneyT]

Seriously. This stuff has been common knowledge since the first generation iPod. There have been numerous softwares to accomplish the same thing and many of them can be found at iPodlounge.com

A simple google search will turn up more than enough results. Was it really nesse3sary to put this on the front page of Slashdot?

Re:Story = Engadget Plug

[ptorrone]

did you not see the "we" with the link to engadget? it's pretty clear that i am with engadget. you might think this info is found in ten seconds with google, but a lot people have no idea which tools are free, which ones work and how to use them. if you can find _one_ article that shows how to do all this for macs, pcs and the hexedit info (again, all in one article that's easy to follow) please let me know. it would have been easier than spending a few hours doing this.

cheers,
pt

CopyPod

[phallstrom]

There's also CopyPod for Windows which allows you to select individual albums/songs. http://www.copypod.net/index.php [copypod.net]

Ha, you should just use linux

[Anonymous Coward]

making a backup of your ipod is as easy as 1-2-3. Just backup everything in /mnt/ipod and make differential backups as you continue. Works for me. Oh, and I never need to actually access the music from my PC because, yes, I don't use it to play back music!

What, you can't do that in windows/mac??

Winamp and iPod plugin

[sielwolf]

Just use the iPod support plugin in Winamp [winamp.com]. Not only does it let you sync and listen to your iPod in Winamp, it allows you to "Copy Selection to Hard Drive". There are still some kinks in it. It has a habit of creating literal album names for directories (which is a problem for DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...". Windows doesn't like them ellipses).

Of course worse comes to worst I navigate into the iPod in Windows Explorer, CTRL+C all the directories and CTRL+V it onto my Harddrive. No big deal.

It's not actually that hard!

[AmunRa]

Just to clarify, it's not actually that hard to get music off an iPod. Sure, iTunes won't let you copy music off it, but on a PC, it's this simple:

1. Enable 'Firewire Disk Usage'
2. Open up explorer, ensure hidden files are visible and browse to the 'iPod_Control\Music' folder on you iPod.

Voila! - All your mp3s are there - you can even play then straight off the iPod (in something like WinAMP) if you like.

Admittedly, on a Mac you have to resort to the Terminal (basically all the music files are hidden in Finder), but it's not exactly rocket science!

Wrong

[kmmatthews]

" Apple didn't have any choice. If they don't play nice with the suicidally stupid record industry, the industry will stop supplying music for the iPod."

That's not what the article says, the article REFUTES that point, sheesh.

ephpod?

[cshor]

When I had an ipod, I used EphPod [ephpod.com] to deal with my music (because iTunes doesn't run on Win ME). EphPod is pretty good on its own, and it has the "feature" that allows you to download from the ipod to your computer. You click and drag. Pretty simple..

Re:Story = Engadget Plug

[Pope]

Free? Download Tinkertool, set all files to visible, then copy the once-hidden folder that's on the iPod to your local drive. Bam!

Not that difficult (OS X instructions)

[Napalm Boy]

Connect your iPod.
In iTunes, select "Enable FireWire disk use." under iPod Preferences.
Open terminal.

cd /Volumes/<name of your iPod>/Music/
cp -r * ~/placeWhereYouAreCopyingTo

Note: this might not be exactly right, as I'm not sitting right in front of Terminal right now. But come on, this isn't exactly rocket science.

Iriver

[AlgorithmBoy]

I just bought an Iriver ifp 795 and i can't get music files off it either. You can use it as a hard drive for other types of files but not musics ones, and only through the iriver music manager software. I hope somebody comes up with a hack for iriver products also.

The Easy Way

[caerwyn]

On a Mac, this is fairly simple.

1) Plug in the iPod and make sure it mounts as a disk. Note the name of the disk (it will be whatever you named your iPod, likely John Doe's iPod).
2) Open a new finder window and press cmd-shift-G. In the sheet that opens up, type the following: "/Volumes/John Doe's iPod/iPod_Control/Music"
3) Your finder window will go the the music folder. It will look empty, but it's not. In the folder *above* the music folder, the music folder itself will appear as a greyed out folder. Drag this icon to wherever you'd like to put it. The copy will begin.
4) Once the copy completes, enjoy the music.

Re:Far simpler way (on a Mac)

[wazzzup]

I'm not saying you're lying but my iPod's library is entirely searchable with non-random file names. The file names on my iPod are in the thisisthesongname.mp3 format.

Just mount the iPod in firewire disk mode go searching via the terminal or make sure you set hidden files as viewable in Finder/Explorer.

Or download the handful of GUI apps that will do it for you. Apple disabled an iTunes plugin - not the ability to move files from your iPod.

Re:Story = Engadget Plug

[American AC in Paris]

Phillip, I don't deny that yours is a good article, but in roughly the past half-year you've had 14 articles accepted, every single one of which has plugged Engadget. Of these fourteen articles, the closest you've come to identifying yourself as part of Engadget is the use of "we" in three of these articles. Other times, you've written stuff like "the folks over at Engadget", which infers that you have nothing to do with Engadget. Usually, though, you make no indication one way or another of your relationship with Engadget, which is just generally misleading.

Can you see how some of us suspect you of trolling for hits?

Re:WARNING NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

It's noon on the East Coast, this story is being read by tons of people from work, and a lot of people can be fired if their web proxy detects them downloading pictures like this [boingboing.net]. I can't direct link to the image because it's generated by a PHP script, but basically it's a topless woman holding a string to barely cover some of her nipples. You could get fired for looking at that at most companies, and it's on the main page of the story link to boingboing.net. It's on topic and people deserve this warning to keep their jobs!

If you must moderate me down so be it but I don't want anyone fired because a story reviewer was irresponsible.

unless Apple breaks find....

[Genady]

cd /Volumes/iPod; find . -name '*.mp3' -exec cp {} /Users/taco/Music/iPodJunk

How hard is that? Please. I remember when Slashdot used to be populated with nerds and talked about stuff that mattered. Not whiners that couldn't open a shell.

What about Playcounts, Playlists?

[Vandil X]

Sure there are ways to copy the music files from an iPod to a PC or Mac.

It's another ordeal entirely to copy the related Playcounts, Playlists, and groupings from a well-groomed iTunes database.

To get everything, just use iPodRip (PC/Mac).

How about using "cp" in the Terminal !!!

[funkdid]

I guess this just shows that /. is full of non-*nix users.

Anyone who halfway knows their way around a *nix machine could do this with their eyes closed.

For those of you who do not, enable "Hard Disk Usage" on your ipod via iTunes. Unmount/mount your ipod. Open your terminal and "cd" into the music folder of your ipod, located in your devices directory. Google search how to copy directories in any *nix environment and you're all done.

No need for someone else to write you a pretty GUI, after all you read /. so do it yourself through the terminal.

precedent set with other players

[SethJohnson]

My first mp3 player was the Rio500. This device inspired a lawsuit against the maker, Diamond Multimedia, because the RIAA claimed it would enable piracy. The case was thrown out of court, but just to cover their asses from additional legal challenges, Diamond disabled the capability for files to easily be copied from the player back to a computer.

A few months ago I just upgraded and bought an iPod 40gig. I really appreciate it over my Rio500. I am disappointed that I can't easily transfer music from the player to my computer, but I can understand their rationale.

Re:Confused

[Accipitradea]

The iTunes information is stored in a "special" way so that's it's not readily displayed on the desktop. You can enable the iPod to also act like a normal firewire drive as well, which you can copy files on and off of, however music you copy on to the iPod this way can't played on the iPod, but can be copied off normally at a different computer.

It's analogous to having two partitions on the iPod, the normal iPod/iTunes parition and the straight up firewire/usb partition. Only music imported through iTunes can be played on the iPod, but any music copied onto the firewire drive can be easily copied off. It's not really two partitions, but that's the general idea.

Open Pod

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7463 [macupdate.com]

Open Pod is an applescript for iTunes that builds a playlist from the files on your iPod, which you can then copy to your music library. This thing saved me hours of re-ripping when I deleted all the music from my hard drive to save space, not knowing that I "couldn't" copy the music back from my iPod (I was an iPod newb when this happened). I don't know if this works in Windows. I would guess not...

Re:stupid ipods

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've got a Neuros. I can copy to/from the device to my heart's content. Then again I can also do live recording to the device, something you iPod people can only make petitions (that get ignored by Apple) about.

But hey, enjoy the ability to view photos on a tiny LCD. That's useful.

Re:Story = Engadget Plug

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

Exactly! What the hell are all these people whinging about? The last time I wanted to move the music off my iPod, I just went into the /Volumes/ entry for it, and used find with an exec statement of "open". With iTunes library consolidation turned on, this happily copies everything back.

I sure hope this isn't another round of Apple Shareware Idiots charging people $29.99 for something that could have been done with a five second Applescript droplet.

Re:Archos

[DrNibbler]

it's flamebait but I'll take it

movies on mobile devices for the time being are all ILLEGAL

That depends... if you're recording a movie off of television and playback on your mobile device (time shifting) or have made a copy of a movie that you legally own on DVD,Video Tape, etc (fair use) it is legal.

Re:USB Storage Device?

[Q2Serpent]

Yes, the iPod is an external drive, and you can see your music (if you enable hidden files and folders), but it is not organized well at all. There are folders like F01 through F19, each one containing a portion of your library. There is a file which contains the entire database of your playlists, and how they map to the files - it is this mapping that the programs exploit, making it useful to view your songs as "artist - title", by playlist, and copy off in that fashion.

Sure, you could just copy F19/*.mp3, if you want. Then you could re-create all of your playlists. There are just easier ways.

Re:Archos

[rwhamann]

Also, I've seen movies for sale at Fry's on CD's for Palms and PocketPC's

Re:Ummmm... I am confused...

[admanb]

It's still that simple, no matter what iPod you own, :).

How to get DRM off your music

[CFrankBernard]

hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) formerly called PlayFair - Removes Apple's FairPlay DRM from iPod / iTunes http://hymn-project.org/ [hymn-project.org]

One Liner

[fupeg]

I've had my iPod since 2001 and have often used to transfer songs. It's really quite simple. Just open up a Terminal (on OSX) or Cygwin (on Windows) and browse to your iPod (usually something like /Volumes/"My iPod" or /cygdrive/f.) Then it's just one line :

find . -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {} /temp_folder \;

That will copy all the MP3 files to some temporary place. Then just drop the folder on iTunes (make sure you have the "let iTunes keep your music organized" option turned on) and it will copy everything nice and neatly to your music library.

Re:Far simpler way (on a Mac)

[mj_1903]

The only problem with doing a copy like that is that it doesn't bring across your playlists, play counts or ratings. Also, songs that are .wav's do not have their meta data brought across as they cannot contain any.

Neither of the programs listed in the article seem to do either, and as a developer of this exact type of software, I know how valuable it can be.

Here are some of the options I find worthy (Mac OS X only):
- iPodRip [thelittleappfactory.com] - I wrote this, so it is a plug for me. Recovers everything. Ten unrestricted uses, so feel free to download it, recover and delete it.
- PodWorks [scifihifi.com] - Cheaper than iPodRip but it contains restrictions. Does not recover all meta data.
- Senuti [ambitiouslemon.com] - Does not recover playlists or any meta data. Free, although if you wanted to recover for free, simply use iPodRip and throw it away.

In the end for most users it is all about ease of use and trust. You can't ask the developer of terminal or the Unix command line for assistance, but you can ask the developer of an application. You also may not feel safe in a CLI, where as a GUI can provide that comfort zone. Those apps only require a single button press and that gives users peace of mind.

my way of copying from an ipod

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a windows user, and i found a cool utility called MP3 Tag Tools (www.download.com). If the user shows hidden files/folders, you can copy the music directory on the ipod after enabling iPod firewire disk. Copy that folder to your hard drive and then run this program and you can rename the files according to the ID3 tags, and even put them in their respective folders, whichever folder name you prefer. my $.02

Make it a perl script

[nsayer]

For a while, Apple was trying to keep folks with 3rd party 802.11g cards from using them with AppleAirPort2.kext, their AirPort Extreme driver. It started when I discovered that you could use their original AirPort Express driver with a Linksys WPC54G simply by changing some stuff in the Info.plist file. Apple responded by locking non-Apple hardware out in the driver - they were checking the PCI device ID against a fixed string in the driver and puking if it wasn't correct. Simply changing the string they were checking against was sufficient to make things work again. So what I did was write a perl script to make the whole patch process totally droolproof and post it at OSXHax [osxhax.com]. Every month or so Apple would release an updated driver (this was early on when 802.11g wasn't yet finalized), and I'd have to change the perl script to find the new location of the string. Finally, Apple gave up. And now if you plug a Buffalo or older Linksys 802.11g cardbus card into an older Powerbook, you too can have AirPort Express just like owners of new PowerBooks do. Only now, you don't have to actually do anything.

So I encourage... someone... to turn the binary patching stuff into a nice, easy perl script. :-)

Another perspective: region coding

[michaeldot]

Has anyone considered that Apple actually made it rather easy to do this?

Had they been the real evil corporation that Apple-haters tend to want to cast them as, they could quite easily have arranged for something like byte scrambling to take place as the music tracks transferred from iTunes to the iPod.

Then, getting the data back to the computer from an iPod would have been a lot harder.

It reminds me of the early days of DVD players:

1. Hollywood insisted that DVD manufacturers install region coding to get a license.
2. Manufacturers did so, but realized sales outside Region 1 would be hampered due to far fewer titles available.
3. Manufacturers made it rather easy to disable region coding, to the extent that a salesman could do it on the way to a cash register.
4. Result: region coding only a minor nuisance to those who had the desire to bypass it.