Getting your music off your ipod
4:16PM, February 08, 2008 - [ Permalink]
I'm writing this while on my way to Toronto by train. Tracey and I exchanged iPods for the trip, her getting my iPod Nano so she could listen to audiobooks and I took her iPod Shuffle so I could just listen to tunes, because my laptop does not have my music collection in it. When I saw that the train had power plugs, I figured I would plug the Shuffle into the MacBook Pro so it would stay charged, but low and behold I got an error:
This of course, was unacceptable to me. Don't click anything - just leave that requester window open for now.
Now, if I had been willing for pay nearly $10 for 802.11b wi-fi access, I could have downloaded some applications that will get you copy your music off the iPod with a nice pretty GUI, but I don't so I had to figure this out myself. Fortunately, going into the Terminal doesn't make me faint or feel otherwise woozy.
Create a directory on your desktop and call it whatever you want - we'll be copying the files off the iPod into there, so I called it musictemp.
Open up Terminal (you can find it in Applications/Utilities/ or just Spotlight it) and type:
cd /Volumes (this changes the directory to where volumes are mounted.)ls (this shows a list files and directories)
In my case, this shows:
Macintosh HD
TAV_S IPOD
The two mounted volumes on this computer - the main hard drive (Macintosh HD) and Tracey's iPod (TAV-S IPOD)
cd "tav_s ipod" (This goes in to the iPod's directory - the name of this directory contains a space, so we have to enclose the name of the directory in quotes so it will be accepted. Otherwise, Terminal will try to change the directory to TAV_S and discard the rest.)
ls
This should show a directory called iPod_Control.
cd ipod_control
ls
This should show two directories;
Music
iTunes
We want to get at our music, so;
cd music
ls
In here, I found three directories;F00
F01
F02
Let's look at one of them;
cd f00
ls
The output from this is : CLZN.mp3 GZCK.mp3 KPES.m4p QHVI.mp3 VGZV.m4a
CQDR.mp3 HUWQ.mp3 KRCO.mp3 QIZS.m4p WXZL.mp3
DKLE.mp3 IQVQ.mp3 KSNY.mp3
Perfect - a list of MP3s and MP4s in here, so let's copy them. Don't worry that they aren't named the way they used to be.
cp *.* /Users/WTL2/Desktop/musictemp
This copies any files in that directory into the directory on my desktop called musictemp. On your system, replace WTL2 with whatever your user is.
This may take a minute or so, depending how many files are in there.
When it is done, we'll back out and go into the next directory and do the same thing.
cd ..
cd f01
cp *.* /Users/WTL2/Desktop/musictemp
And again, it may take a minute to copy the files, but when it is;
cd ..
cd f002
cp *.* /Users/WTL2/Desktop/musictemp
Now, all the files are now in a directory on my desktop called musictemp. I can open it up look and see they are all there. You can now close the Terminal.
So we can click Cancel on the iTunes requester, and the iPod should vanish. Now, select all the files you want to copy over into iTunes and drag and drop them into iTunes or onto the iTunes icon in the dock.
iTunes should copy the songs in, complete with all the data about the song name, artist, album etc, but seems to loose the album art - which I guess is okay by me. This was just a quick workaround, but it *does* work.
