Can you put songs from the iPod onto a new Mac?

dferigmu said:

I'm asking b/c what if I have all my songs on my iPod, which has its own hard drive, and my Mac's hard drive crashes?

What would I do with all my songs? Would I be able to put them back onto a new hard drive?

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Yeah.
If you are familiar with the terminal:

cd /Volumes/"ipodname"/ipod_control/Music/

Here you find several folders, all starting with the letter F

you could also use this

mkdir /ipodmusic
cp /Volumes/"ipodname"/ipod_control/Music/*/* /ipodmusic

then you will find all songs at the root of you hd in a folder called ipodmusic

if you're not familiar with the terminal you can get PodUtil. i use the windows version and it works great with a nice gui. it says it's 5 pounds (sorry no UK keyboard) but it works for free--just nags you.

go to iPodlounge.com there are a dozen programs to pull songs off your iPod, if you do not wish to play around with terminal. i finally got an external FW drive for a backup so i am not concered with my iPod being a backup device. but, before that i used Podmanager, im assuming its still around though it has been a while. and these programs seem to come and go with every revision of iTunes and iPod firmware as apple trys to prevent people to do this. there used to be one that worked as a plug in to iTunes and was pretty cool, but i know apple changed iTunes to prevent that.

dferigmu said:

What's the terminal and why doesn't Apple let you do this?

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Apple doesn't let you do this because it would be too easy to take someone else's ipod and download its contents on your computer. This is also known as illegal file trading. The RIAA would have sued long ago if Apple hadn't built in this feature. Luckily, for people in your situation, whom merely want to transfer songs to your new Mac, there are some solutions. Terminal is one, but obviously you probably dont want to have to get into that. There are some shareware apps that you can buy that will do it for you, but I use a little freeware app (basically a little applescript) that works fine. I cant remember the name, but when I get home from work and get on my Mac I will re-post here so you can do a search for it. One important thing to note first, when hooking the old iPod to the new Mac, DO NOT click yes to "do you want to link this iPod with the new library." If you do, it will get erased. Before disconnecting the iPod make sure the update option is set to manual, this will keep the iPod from getting erased until you can transfer the songs.

The program is definitely called ipodtracks2desktop. There is a newer version but this one works fine in Panther for me. If you would like a copy, email me.