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Music Media Media (Apple)

How to Get Music Off Your iPod 473

Posted by michael from the delete-button-deemed-harmful dept.
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.
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How to Get Music Off Your iPod More

How to Get Music Off Your iPod

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  • Short-lived? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:28PM (#10702642) Homepage
    It's not that first time such 'backup' tool is available, and it's also not the first time Apple found ways to neutralize such tool by way of a new version.

    Additionally, it's relatively easy (compared to ripping CDs) to do it on iPod because Apple basically owns the device and its content, and they can do a lot to force users to comply. iPod doesn't need to follow a standard format (like CDs must play in all CD players), they can set/change the format to suit.

    The article is quick to point out that "We're also hopeful Apple might consider not spending engineering time and lawyer fees on chasing after applications and developers who just want to give folks an obvious feature that's being left out only to appease the RIAA. At the end of the day, Apple needs to know that we're their customers, too."

    However I think the BoingBoing article sums it up nicely - " 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."

    When/If these online music distributors have gained enough market shares (maybe 30% of all music album buyers?), they might able to turn around and force the record industry to make changes, because it's not nice to lose 30% sales overnight.

    • Wrong (Score:5, Informative)

      by kmmatthews ( 779425 ) <krism@mailsnare.net> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:38PM (#10702794) Homepage Journal
      " 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.

      • Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MushMouth ( 5650 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:25PM (#10703473)
        Except the rebuttal that the article gives is not particularly useful. Apple's customer is joe normal user who could care less about copying files off their iPod, because they already have them on their computer. And this joe customer really wants to be able to easily buy a copy of Eminem's Mosh single and load it onto their iPod. Guess what to be able to do the second they may have to prevent the first. Which is more important to Apple and Apple's primary customers?

    • Re:Short-lived? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ethan0 ( 746390 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:47PM (#10703774)
      Apple basically owns the device and its content Funny, I thought after dropping a few hundred on it, I owned my iPod.

    • Why is this useful? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @05:01PM (#10703949) Journal
      This tool should be pointless to begin with.

      It has already been clearly established that the iPod is not a 'backup' medium and it is not acceptable to store the 'only' copies of your music on it. Quite regularly, answers in Apple's troubleshooting tips for iPod problems instruct the user to restore the Pod, which returns it to the completely empty default-install state.

      So why would anyone be silly enough to keep the only copies of their music on their iPod, forcing them to then use this tool? With iTunes, you can't even get music onto the Pod without first importing it into the library. So it's a given that the music is already on your computer. (And where did it come from? If absolutely necessary, you can re-rip your CDs, or copy from your burned backups for iTMS or illegal music downloads.)

      So tell me, is there a legitimate reason for your only copy of any song to be exclusively stored on your iPod?

      • Re:Why is this useful? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by valmont ( 3573 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @05:54PM (#10704637) Homepage Journal

        well, back when i first got my ipod, i only had the original 400Mhz TiBook with the 10Gig hard drive. i quickly got in the habit of separately managing tracks that went on my iPod to save hard drive space: i'd rip stuff local, then would drag music to the ipod, and erase from local library. That's kinda been my modus operandi since then. Now that I have an AlBook with 80G HD ... yeah i could go back to the "normal" way, though i'm already at 61% full.

        I'll be holding off on that iTunes upgrade. While i'm typically a staunch Apple advocate, the fact that they're actively blocking apps from interacting with the library is deeply troubling to me.

      • Re:Why is this useful? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dalutong ( 260603 ) <djtansey@gmail . c om> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @05:55PM (#10704655)
        I can give you a real-world example.

        My girlfriend (the most honest person I know) has just moved out of her house and off to college. Her iPod, which she has owned for a couple of years, was synced with her mom's Mac. For whatever reason her mom's HD fried.

        My girlfriend was SOL. She had downloaded a good amount of music legitimately but now couldn't get any more because if she sync'd with her iTunes and the new music she'd gotten it would wipe her iPod clean.

        What did we do? We restored her music to her PC using a tool similar to these.

        So that's one legit reason. Some quick ones I can come up with off the top of my head include:

        -getting a new computer
        -using two computers (i.e. laptop and desktop) and wanting be able to use both for adding music to the library
        -computer (hardware or software) is messed up in some way

        and, as another poster said, it is YOUR iPod and YOUR music. why can't do with it as you please? What if I got the thing to be both my music player and a good sized portable HD for me to take with me as i travel the world? It's my iPod, after all.

    • Re:Short-lived? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Graff ( 532189 )

      It's not that first time such 'backup' tool is available, and it's also not the first time Apple found ways to neutralize such tool by way of a new version.

      Under Mac OS X Apple includes a free way to back up the music on your iPod. Just run Terminal.app and enter this line:

      ditto -V --rsrc /Volumes/ipodname/iPod_Control/Music ~/Desktop

      Folders named like "F00", "F01", "F02" will be placed on your Desktop, drag them into iTunes and you are all set.

      I'm sure that you can do the same thing under Windows an

  • Archos (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is exactly why I go with Archos.

    Video, Pictures, and you don't have to do anything illegal to be able to keep your own music.

  • Story = Engadget Plug (Score:3, Insightful)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) * on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:29PM (#10702664) Homepage
    C'mon. This know-how is easily found with ten seconds and access to Google--hell, just submit a query using article title word for word [google.com] and you'll get a decent result. This information has been around for ages, and there's nothing particularly timely or new about it now.

    This story is simply yet another plug for the folks over at Engadget.com, submitted by Mr. Torrone [slashdot.org] himself. (Hint: he's with Engadget.) They're trolling for hits, plain and simple.

    At least grant us the courtesy of a disclosure statement if you're gonna let 'em plug their site under the guise of news.

    • Re:Story = Engadget Plug (Score:5, Informative)

      by ptorrone ( 638660 ) * <{moc.tiurfada} {ta} {tp}> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:34PM (#10702745)
      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
      • "it's pretty clear that i am with engadget."

        I guess it wasn't so clear to me either.

        Was it a paid placement? Fark went through a bit of a brouhaha [wired.com] when it turned out some of their stories were paid placements.

        • just to be clear, this was not a paid-placement. engadget has never paid for any placement on /. ever. i am not sure how much more clear it could have been that the article is from us. if you look at most of the stories, almost all are by the authors of the articles. and if they're not, it's someone not saying who they really are, any time i submit something i do it as me and make it clear who i am and who i write with.

      • Re:Story = Engadget Plug (Score:4, Informative)

        by Pope ( 17780 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:43PM (#10702872)
        Free? Download Tinkertool, set all files to visible, then copy the once-hidden folder that's on the iPod to your local drive. Bam!

        • 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:Story = Engadget Plug (Score:5, Informative)

        by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) * on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:57PM (#10703061) Homepage
        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:Story = Engadget Plug (Score:5, Interesting)

          by ptorrone ( 638660 ) * <{moc.tiurfada} {ta} {tp}> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:10PM (#10703239)
          keep in mind, 99.999% of the time when i submit a story on /. someone edits it before it goes live. this post about getting content off your ipod isn't exactly what i submitted either. usually it's edited, links added or removed and then posted. you can of course think whatever you want and suspect anything, i'm honestly not trolling for hits, i'm trying to write cool stuff i think people will like and find useful. that said, i realize some people are up to no good, so it causes any reasonable person to be skeptical about any post.

          cheers,
          pt
        • Maybe I'm the freak, but when I read 'we' here I assumed it meant 'we iPod users', not 'we at a company I'm not going to state in this write-up but you'd see if you hover your cursor over the word we'. Sure, it's a link (now, anyway - not sure if it always was) but being a two letter green word among black lettering it's easy to miss.

          I also don't see why you're defensive. It seems like every story involving a 'sister site' (or whatever) of Slashdot notes that in passing. Just start putting a disclaime

    • Re:Story = Engadget Plug (Score:5, Funny)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:38PM (#10702798)
      trolling for hits

      Then give 'em what they want. Hit the reload buttons, fellow Slashdotters!
    • I appreciate seeing the article posted here and on Engadget. I was considering buying an iPod but I was not aware that Apple discourages iPod backups and future iPods will probably try to make backups impossible. Furthermore it seems iTunes does not allow you to re-download songs you that already paid for. This is ridiculous. So I would like to thank Endgadget and Slashdot for saving me the money I would have wasted in iPod/iTunes.

  • WARNING NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!! (Score:4, Informative)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <`aaaaa' `at' `SPAM.yahoo.com'> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:30PM (#10702675) Journal
    story link contains pornographic ads.

  • Far simpler way (on a Mac) (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:31PM (#10702680)
    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.

    • Re:Far simpler way (on a Mac) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:37PM (#10702785)
      I don't know when we started being so collectively condescending to the average computer user, but there was a time when you might tell a user to copy a file on their computer and reasonably believe they could do it. These days, most people approach the user like you might approach your retarded cousin who was raised by ferrets on a remote island: don't tell them anything, you might frighten or confuse them (unfrozen-caveman-lawyer style).

      Personally, I have faith in people, and when someone asks me how to copy files off their iPod, I show them how to do it with the normal shell commands or file manager interfaces. The belief that people need a WYSIWYG GUI application to move files between storage devices is, I think, a result of the incorrect and insulting attitude that developers are so much smarter than their users.

      • These days, most people approach the user like you might approach your retarded cousin who was raised by ferrets on a remote island: don't tell them anything, you might frighten or confuse them (unfrozen-caveman-lawyer style).

        That's because there are a whole fuckton of people out there who don't know, don't care, and refuse to learn even the most basic thing about computers (like copying files or not clicking on random attachments). The revel in their ignorance. Faced by such willful ignorance, the docum

      • I do point out how to do things in the shell to others and in online forums from time to time. But for example, one thing I was trying to help someone with was formatting a drive with FAT16 and an odd cluster size. I think you would agree that pointing out how to use format_msdos requrires a fair degree of precision and warning about how if they get the device wrong they could loose the main drive! I trust users to a point, but the shell can be very powerful so you want to be clear about what will happen

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • If you use a mac, there are plenty of graphical applications, some free and some shareware (that you can get from versiontracker.com), that allow you to easily get songs off your iPod and access it through an iTunes-like interface:

      1) iPodRip
      2) iPod Access

      And some cool apps that let you download RSS feeds and news to your iPod like "Pod2Go". Just search versiontracker.com for "ipod", you'll get plenty of results.
    • 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

  • "Eat shit and die"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:31PM (#10702686)
    I would hardly say that Apple trying to protect its relationship with the music content providers, which is the whole reason that the iTunes Music Store exists in the first place, not to mention the online store with by far the highest marketshare, is tantamount to Apple telling its customers to "eat shit and die" [boingboing.net].

    His preemptive rebuttals are also complete bullshit. Yes, we're the "customers", not Sony/BMG. And he himself admits that the record companies are idiots; yes, those are the idiots that Apple has to deal with. A lot of people think it was a miracle Apple/Steve Jobs got them even to agree to this "crazy experiment" in the first place.

    Additionally, getting music back off the iPod is not part of the advertised capabilities or features of the service, period, and never was. Remember iTunes 4.0b12? It let you go both ways between every iPod and iTunes under the sun, with no limits. You could two-way sync every iPod and iTunes library on earth. Remember iTunes 4.0, and its internet music sharing? The record industry might not be telling Apple *exactly* the specifics of how to implement the protections, but Apple is under pressure to not make it too "easy" to "share" music on a wide scale, while still making the DRM and protections as transparent as it possibly can.

    The proponents of things like iPod Download, and even the linked article, talk about things like stolen computers and hard drive failures. Well, in fairness, Apple does have a recommendation. You might hate it, and you might think it sucks, but it's to have your music library backed up somewhere other than your computer, and other than your iPod [apple.com] .

    Further, as long as the iPod is just a freaking disk, its contents will be able to be retrieved. But Apple CANNOT look as if it is passively ignoring things that are perceived by the music industry to be "dangerous", whether they are or not. Yes, Apple can try to help the music industry understand, and even pressure them in the right direction - and probably has, quite a bit, frankly. Remember, this whole online download thing is in its utter infancy.

    If you want to hate or blame Apple for "selling out", and saying that they should just tell people like Sony/BMG to go fuck themselves, and if they lose them they lose them, fine...that's you call. And no one is forcing you to use or buy any of Apple's services. This is Apple's service and products, and they're running them how they feel they have to to ensure the iTunes Music Store's continued existence. Do you think they WANT to make things hard on customers? Quite the opposite! And maybe someday Apple will have the leverage to start pressing these things with the music industry - Jobs believes people should really be able to do what they want with their music. But people also want music from the major labels, so you can't piss them off right off the bat. What to do? Frankly, I think Apple is in the right here, and Cory Doctorow is the one who can eat shit and die.

    • Apple really is doing customers a disservice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by VidEdit ( 703021 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:35PM (#10702752)
      I think one important aspect to Apple's constant user downgrades of the iPod/iTMs is that they stop customers from doing what Apple tells them to do: Back up their songs.

      Oddly, Apple's iTMS wants it both ways. They say they are selling you a license for the song, not the physical song. But when you lose a song, they treat it like you lost physical property, even though you paid an apparently perpetual license fee that allows you to have the song and play it.

      If something happens to your iTunes library, Apple will not let you re-download those songs again even though the "Fair Play" DRM insures that their could be no piracy involved, since the songs would be locked to the same computers as the original. Tough luck, says Apple, it's your fault for not backing up. Naturally, one would think that the iPod's large disk drive and auto synch would be the perfect way to back up songs, but the schizophrenic Apple won't let you copy your songs off iPod. (Yes, there are ways, but Apple may close that back door at any time.) iPod owners are constantly having to ask on Forums how to recover their accidentally erased iTMS library from their iPod because Apple doesn't officially allow anyway to copy their songs from your iPod to restore their music. Ridiculous.

      Their is literally no customer advantage to the Apple downgrades. And copying your legal songs is not illegal. I'm glad that Corry is staying on this.
    • DRM or no DRM - making a back up is perfectly reasonable.

      I was actually considering the iPod as my first ever Mac device purchase (although I have had some Mac hand-me-downs before). But after all that, I can hardly see the point. It seems to me that iPod just lost its supposedly number one reason for being better than the competition - the much advertised "ease of use." Without "ease of use" what is left beyond the fashion accessory argument?

      Crap product. Move along...

    • Re:"Eat shit and die"? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tsm_sf ( 545316 ) * on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:53PM (#10703004) Journal
      Additionally, getting music back off the iPod is not part of the advertised capabilities or features of the service, period, and never was

      And yet, it's standard functionality for all other mp3 players. Auto companies don't explicitly state that their cars go in reverse, but it would be noteworthy if one didn't, right?
    • Since Wal*Mart is starting to put the squeeze on the RIAA and the music pimps, they will see that it is in their own best interest to maintain an ITMS as a hedge against being pushed, like all Wal*Mart suppliers, into dependency, servitude and eventual oblivion as independent entities.

      Wall*Mart is NOT good for America.

      Wall*Mart causes price wars that they ultimately win on volume (buy cheap in China and sell cheap in the 'States [and let the volume take care of the shipping,]) and everyone they rub up aga

  • Alternatively (Score:3, Informative)

    by lakeland ( 218447 ) <lakeland@acm.org> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:32PM (#10702700) Homepage
    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? (Score:5, Informative)

    by MoneyT ( 548795 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:34PM (#10702741) Journal
    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?

  • CopyPod (Score:5, Informative)

    by phallstrom ( 69697 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:34PM (#10702748)
    There's also CopyPod for Windows which allows you to select individual albums/songs. http://www.copypod.net/index.php [copypod.net]

  • Winamp and iPod plugin (Score:5, Informative)

    by sielwolf ( 246764 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:37PM (#10702776) Homepage Journal
    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! (Score:5, Informative)

    by AmunRa ( 166367 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:37PM (#10702782) Homepage

    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!

    • Does anyone have some advice for how to enable the playing of .m4a files off of the iPod in Knoppix Linux? I can hook my iPod to the machine at work, and can even access the hard drive...and I can play the files in mp3 encoding via Knoppix's XMMS. But to play AACs requires some special plugin, which in turn requires additional libraries, and they all need to be compiled, and it's all beyond my ability to make work with this read-only LiveCD implementation.

  • How-To needed (Score:5, Funny)

    by C.U.T.M. ( 595268 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:39PM (#10702809)
    What we really need is a how-to instructing geek nation how to get their iPod back after some scumbag stole it!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ephpod? (Score:3, Informative)

    by cshor ( 111947 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:42PM (#10702848) Homepage
    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:ephpod? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
      The tense of your comment seems to indicate that you kept Windows ME, but got rid of your iPod. Are you sure you're posting on the right website?

      --Dan

  • What's the freakin' point? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NaugaHunter ( 639364 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:43PM (#10702878)
    Doesn't all music on an iPod come from a computer? Why not get it from there? The only point I can see to this is the argument of hard drive crash, but there's no need to damn Apple for not providing tools they never said they would.

    Just back the files you didn't get from your own CD's to data CD's and be done with it.
  • 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.

  • Damnit Apple! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@@@yahoo...com> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:44PM (#10702884) Journal
    This reminds me of when Apple removed the ability to share songs over the net via iTunes.

    Rather than restrict sharing to say, 3 network MAC addresses, they removed the feature altogether.

    This seems to be another annoyance for users who just want to stream their iTunes from home to a pals house, or musicians who use the iPod to listen to their own music.

    Again, no trouble for those who would like to bypass such restrictions, just a pain in the ass for those who use(d) these features legitimately.

    • Rather than restrict sharing to say, 3 network MAC addresses, they removed the feature altogether.

      How quickly do you think that would last as a protection scheme? I've had 5 ethernet cards in the past two years. All of them had the same MAC address.
    • That seems like a ridiculous idea. MAC addresses only exist on the local network therefore this would lead to even more restrictive behavior than before.

      Over the internet you have to use IP addresses... since they are (normally) globally unique.

  • Iriver (Score:2, Informative)

    by AlgorithmBoy ( 623532 )
    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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by caerwyn ( 38056 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @03:44PM (#10702886)
    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.
  • once upon a time OS X 10.3 messed up my HD completely with the encryption of a large file and not enough HD space. that meant total system crash, and therefore mp3 collection gone. after searching around, i came across ipodrip [thelittleappfactory.com] which trivially restored my data off the ipod. costs $10, but then $10 compared to a whole music collection is peanuts -- and you want to support the smart guys who figured out to undo the weirdness of the ipod filesystem...

  • *sighs* (Score:2, Interesting)

    by admanb ( 824304 )

    It's like everyone was just waiting around for Apple to do something like this, and now that they've done it, no matter how minisculy important it is, OMFG APPLE IS FORCE-FEEDING US FECES.

    There's dozens of programs out there that let you download from an iPod (so many have been linked already that I won't even bother) the one difference between all those and iPod Download? iPod Download is an iTunes plug-in. Is it really a stretch to imagine the RIAA pulling their music from the iTMS (or even suing App

  • If Microsoft did this, all of Slashdot would be outraged and ranting about evilness and what not.

    Apple does it and people come out of the woodwork to defend them and find work-arounds.

    Why is buying an Apple iPod is any different than buying an MP3 player laden with Microsoft DRM?
    • Perhaps because the iPod isn't DRM'ed? If you read everybody elses comments.. you'll see that it's relatively trivial to copy files off of the iPod through the finder, terminal, or through windows explorer.
  • If you don't like what Apple is doing (and this is certainly not the first time they've done something I don't like) then don't buy their products. Don't hack the damn player just so you can have your own music. Vote with your feet. It's the only way they'll get the message.

    The iPod was the only Apple device I'd considered buying in about 20 years. (I learnt my lesson from the way I was treated with my last purchase which was an Apple IIe). Its this sort of nonesense that means I won't do it. Other players
  • 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.
  • Here's a nice little hack that runs on basically any platform with Perl.

    http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/src/icopy.pl [darkridge.com]

    Specify a search pattern and it will copy from the iPod to a specified destination any song whose Title, Album, or Artist matches the search string.

    --jordan

  • What about Playcounts, Playlists? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:09PM (#10703234)
    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 !!! (Score:3, Informative)

    by funkdid ( 780888 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:11PM (#10703247)
    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.

  • Off topic but I'm interested (Score:3, Interesting)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:13PM (#10703278) Homepage Journal
    what do /.ers think is the most hackable portable music player? I have a few things that I would love to do with my player, such as making audio "flash cards" for the languages I am learning, along wiht the word printed on the screen(I'm learning Chinese and Japanese, so it would be nice if I could take advantage of the fact that the iPod can render all those characters).
    It's pretty obvious it's possible to do this on the iPod, but Apple won't release SDKs for it. Are there any players that will let you program them to achieve such a thing?

  • precedent set with other players (Score:3, Informative)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:16PM (#10703318) Homepage Journal


    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.

  • Open Pod (Score:4, Informative)

    by AragornSonOfArathorn ( 454526 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:21PM (#10703423)
    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...

  • Why are they making it so complex?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ip_fired ( 730445 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:22PM (#10703436) Homepage
    I've never had a problem getting the songs off of my iPod, especially since I use iTunes to organize my music. The music is just stored in a hidden directory on the iPod, so all you have to do is copy that directory, and then tell iTunes (or any other good jukebox) to import a directory. Tada! Music transferred. It's not like Apple made it really difficult to remove it.

  • How to get DRM off your music (Score:3, Informative)

    by CFrankBernard ( 605994 ) * <cfrankbNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:56PM (#10703877)
    hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere) formerly called PlayFair - Removes Apple's FairPlay DRM from iPod / iTunes http://hymn-project.org/ [hymn-project.org]

  • cp `find /Volumes/iPod -name "*.mp3"` / (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheLittleJetson ( 669035 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @04:58PM (#10703909)
    nuff said.

  • One Liner (Score:5, Informative)

    by fupeg ( 653970 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @05:20PM (#10704250)
    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.

  • Make it a perl script (Score:3, Informative)

    by nsayer ( 86181 ) <nsayer.kfu@com> on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @06:56PM (#10705318) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by michaeldot ( 751590 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @07:12PM (#10705470)

    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.

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