porting iPod to new computer

[peter grimes]

My wife's original macBook died a year or so ago, and that had all of our ripped CDs on the iTunes. Of course, we hadn't backed anything up :wall bash:

But at least the iTunes library was duplicated on her iPod. We're now getting around to straightening all this out, and found a great article that I *thought* was going to solve this for me. I was going to place the hidden music folder of the iPod into her iTunes on the MacBookPro:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/copying-music-from-ipod-to-computer/P1

In Mac OS X, the process of displaying hidden files and folders is actually somewhat more complex, and requires entering commands into the “Terminal” application. To do this, open “Terminal” from under your Applications/Utilities folder, and then type in the following at the command prompt:


defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

(Note that if you don’t know how to use “Terminal” or where to find it, you should probably stop reading this section now and skip ahead to the Third-Party Tools section, where all of these details can be easily handled for you)

Once you have typed in these commands, return to the Finder window and select your iPod from the drive listing, and you should see the iPod_Control folder:

[snipped img]

Once in the iPod_Control folder, you will see a number of sub-folders, including a Music folder. Despite the name, it is in this folder that all of your audio and video files actually reside.

Fortunately, however, the internal ID3 tags are still intact, so any application that can read these tags can easily sort this back out. In fact, you can take these tracks and simply reimport them directly into iTunes via the File, Add to Library option and it will happily sort them all out for you, even renaming and restructuring them in the process if you have the Keep iTunes Music folder organized setting turned on in your iTunes advanced preferences.

In fact, in a complete disaster-recovery scenario, you can even import ALL of your music files directly from the iPod itself by using the File, Add to Folder option in iTunes. To do this, you will first want to ensure that the Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library option is enabled in your iTunes advanced preferences:

[snipped img]

Once you’ve confirmed that this setting is enabled (thus ensuring that iTunes will actually copy the tracks back to your hard drive instead of referencing them directly from your iPod), you can simply select File, Add Folder to Library (Windows) or File, Add to Library (Mac) and choose the \iPod_Control\Music folder directly. iTunes will copy all of your media tracks from your iPod back to your iTunes Music Folder location, organizing them into sub-folders by ARTIST and ALBUM in the process, and naming them appropriately, all based on the internal tag information that is still stored within the files themselves.

Once your music is all safely back on your computer and imported into your iTunes library, you could then reconnect the iPod and choose the Erase and Sync option, which would erase the content from your iPod and replace it with the newly-restored content in your iTunes library.

Things went fine until I got to the bolded section. When I clicked 'Add to Library', the finder pane in iTunes wasn't displaying any hidden folders.

EDIT: I created a new folder in the laptop's \Music folder, called 'oldipod'. But again, when I clicked 'Add to Library', the 'oldiPod' wasn't showing in the iTunes window even though my Finder window was showing 'oldipod' as a hidden folder.

So I'm wondering if I can modify the Terminal command suggested above to something like:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

I'm just guessing here, so I may be way off base.

 

[dutchfire]

Does this help?
http://macs.about.com/od/backupsarchives/ss/ipodcopy_6.htm

 

[peter grimes]

Does this help?
http://macs.about.com/od/backupsarchives/ss/ipodcopy_6.htm

I suspect this is a better solution than my method.

I'll give it a shot tonight

 

[peter grimes]

Yep, that worked.

Copied the individual mp4's and such to a folder on the desktop, then did 'add to library' and it worked perfectly.

Thanks for the link

 

[Zack]

Wouldn't simply syncing the iPod with a new computer have worked, as long as you used the same iTunes account?

 

[peter grimes]

Wouldn't simply syncing the iPod with a new computer have worked, as long as you used the same iTunes account?

No. The ipod doesn't care as much about the account as it does the physical computer. it has something to do with the way Apple handles Digital Rights Management.

Ipods and iTunes are designed to primarily allow traffic in one direction: from iTunes to iPod.

The first page of the article i linked in the first post explains it well.

 

[Zack]

No. The ipod doesn't care as much about the account as it does the physical computer. it has something to do with the way Apple handles Digital Rights Management.

Ipods and iTunes are designed to primarily allow traffic in one direction: from iTunes to iPod.

The first page of the article i linked in the first post explains it well.

But iTunes is DRM free now. I know that when I did a fresh install of Windows on my ~2 year old laptop, I was able to transfer all of the files from my iPhone to iTunes without a problem.

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

I'm glad I don't use iTunes/iPod, I can just use file explorer to easily copy my mp3s in both directions.

 

[peter grimes]

But iTunes is DRM free now. I know that when I did a fresh install of Windows on my ~2 year old laptop, I was able to transfer all of the files from my iPhone to iTunes without a problem.

Maybe it's just an OSX thing?

Either way, dutchfire's link solved the issue

 

[sophie]

But iTunes is DRM free now. I know that when I did a fresh install of Windows on my ~2 year old laptop, I was able to transfer all of the files from my iPhone to iTunes without a problem.

Yeah, for a time I was using my iPod as a portable backup for my music. You can easily gain access to the music files on the iPod by revealing hidden folders and going into the iPod when it's hooked up to the computer.

 

[CarolHarry]

I am using a PC, is there a solution to porting it to PC?

Okay, I finished the transferring with another software.
I transfer music from iPod to computer with a tool called iOS Transfer.
It's quite a convenient and handy tool for you to port anything from iPod to computer.

 

[sophie]

I am using a PC, is there a solution to porting it to PC?

Yeah.

Yeah, for a time I was using my iPod as a portable backup for my music. You can easily gain access to the music files on the iPod by revealing hidden folders and going into the iPod when it's hooked up to the computer.