How To Get Music Off Of An iPod

Another post about computer trouble? Oh yeah. For an IT professional, I have remarkably bad luck with computers. Six weeks after I got that new Dell, the hard drive up and died. Conveniently, it decided to die a few weeks after I wiped my old computer. Thanks. Yes, I am going to buy an external hard drive dedicated to backups after this experience.

After Dell replaced the hard drive, I thought I'd be fine. I still had my Money file and e-mail archives backed up to a 512 MB USB key, and there must be some way to get my music off the iPod. All I would need to do is upgrade the new OS to XP Pro. In that process, here's what I learned:

USB keys show up as drive partitions when installing Windows XP.

So when you see that extra 512 MB partition show up that you didn't know you had, unplug your USB key. Don't format that partition. You'll hate yourself later, when you think and think and then realize that you've formatted your backup drive and lost every e-mail you've sent and received since 1997 (I had an extra copy of the Money file).

I'm not going to dwell on that. I'm going to dwell on the fact that I had all the music in the world that I cared about on the iPod, and now I needed to get it back on the hard drive. First, when you plug in the iPod, iTunes will determine that the iPod is not associated with the system, and ask if you want to associate them, deleting all files from the iPod. In this case, you'll definitely want to click No.

Then, in the iTunes Preferences panel, clicking Enable disk use causes the iPod to show up as a network drive. But when you browse the iPod's file system, you see that the music is all in a hidden folder, and all the music files have been given cryptic names. At least the music's there, but getting it out and converting back to a readable filename would be a nightmare.

A coworker found SharePod, and it's done the trick. It's a free tiny app that lives on and runs from the iPod. It's got a basic user interface that lets you copy music from an iPod to the local system, and name the files however you want, using information from the ID3 tags. Praise be.

Sure, SharePod is more commonly used to transfer music files from person to person via iPod (which would be wrong), but in this case, it was just what I needed. Using SharePod, I easily copied all the music files from my iPod to a single folder on my PC. It would have been nice if SharePod organized the music files by artist/album/file, but at this point, I'm willing to overlook that. It may take a few (okay, more than ten so far) hours to re-organize my music files, but I'm just glad to have them back.

Now, if you've sent me an e-mail since 1997, I'm sorry, but I seem to have lost your address.