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PC Tips by Rick Byerly
Moving music from your Ipod to a hard drive:Free Guide to moving your music from your iPod to your PC
Don't buy software to move, copy music from your ipod! Apple designates all the mp3s on your Ipod as hidden files to make it harder for you to have control over your own music! Check out the free way to do it:
1. Click Start on your pc, then Control Panel > Folder Options > View. In the Advanced Settings list, under Hidden files and folders, check the radio button for “Show hidden files and folders”. Click OK.
2. Plug in iPod and wait several minutes until pc recognizes the ipod. Go to My Computer and click on the drive assigned to your ipod, double-click on that. Go to the sub-folders “iPod_Control” and then “music”. You’ll find your music there randomly scattered across multiple folders and with scrambled file names. The ID3 tags are still fully intact and now it's time to “unscramble” the files.
3. Copy all the music from those iPod folders into a new folder on your hard-drive. You may not be able to copy them all at once but don't worry if you get cyclical redundancy errors etc you can just copy them 3-4 folders at a time. Note that there may be some duplicate scrambled names but just rename those and add another character. Then move all the songs into one single folder and discard all the folders that your iPod made. Make sure you don't overwrite those duplicate scrambled titles! By the end, you should have one folder in your hard-drive with all the scrambled files together.
4. Open up iTunes : Go to Edit > Preferences. Under the
Advanced tab, under the General “sub-tab”, select the local folder where you have copied the music from your iPod.
Check the box “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and click OK. Also make sure you have wiped all previous music from iTunes so your playlists are blank.
5. In iTunes, click “File” then “add folder to library”. Select the folder where all your copied music is. iTunes will now re-import all your music back into the playlists. But more importantly, because you have previously clicked “Keep iTunes Music Folder organised”, iTunes will now start renaming and organising your songs into their correct names, albums and folders. This may take a while depending on how many songs you have in your iTunes library. Then go back to Tools > Folder Options > View. Reverse what you did so the hidden files remain hidden again. You may also want to de-select “Keep iTunes Music Folder organized” if you don’t normally use that option.
Guide was adapted from several online sources, Enjoy!
check out more tips and articles here including free firewalls and av protection
Rick Byerly is a fine art digital and film photographer, knowledgeable and experienced in internet security and privacy, and maintains his own websites.
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