Okay, trying to help out a friend in need. Just to put this at the top, we tried the steps listed in the "Recovering Songs from your iPod" guide here at MacRumors and have run into problems, hence my post.
My friend's iPod (a 4th gen color iPod w/ click wheel) is now the sole repository for his music. He lost his main computer's collection due to an unfortunate hard drive death. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, except that iTunes claims the iPod has a problem and needs to be restored to factory settings (which would wipe all his music). Obviously he doesn't want that to happen. Bizzare thing is, the iPod works completely fine on its ownwhen it's playing music, detached from a computer, it functions perfectly. No crashes, no hangs, no missing tracks or otherwise corrupted files. You can still browse tracks and play them fine. It's totally functional.
So we used the "reveal hidden folders/files" method to copy the Music folder and its Byzantine structure off to a machine's hard drive here at the office, then went to add the files to iTunes. Problem number one: iTunes wouldn't add the files since they were still apparently hidden. So we used a utility to change the "invisible" bit on the files/folders and went to import them again. This time iTunes imported all the files (we had it set to copy them to the library and rename/organize them so they'd be rescued from the "four letter folder/filename" thing), but they play back incorrectly. Some are incredibly short, or don't play anything, others start mid-way through and end quickly... it's like all the data isn't there, despite the fact that the ID3 tag information was successfully pulled from the files and they're all still the correct file sizes.
So, basically, I'm not sure what's going wrong. Is there some critical step I've missed? Should I use a different utility to rename the files, like MediaRage? Basically, is there any easy way to deal with this problem?
My friend's iPod (a 4th gen color iPod w/ click wheel) is now the sole repository for his music. He lost his main computer's collection due to an unfortunate hard drive death. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, except that iTunes claims the iPod has a problem and needs to be restored to factory settings (which would wipe all his music). Obviously he doesn't want that to happen. Bizzare thing is, the iPod works completely fine on its ownwhen it's playing music, detached from a computer, it functions perfectly. No crashes, no hangs, no missing tracks or otherwise corrupted files. You can still browse tracks and play them fine. It's totally functional.
So we used the "reveal hidden folders/files" method to copy the Music folder and its Byzantine structure off to a machine's hard drive here at the office, then went to add the files to iTunes. Problem number one: iTunes wouldn't add the files since they were still apparently hidden. So we used a utility to change the "invisible" bit on the files/folders and went to import them again. This time iTunes imported all the files (we had it set to copy them to the library and rename/organize them so they'd be rescued from the "four letter folder/filename" thing), but they play back incorrectly. Some are incredibly short, or don't play anything, others start mid-way through and end quickly... it's like all the data isn't there, despite the fact that the ID3 tag information was successfully pulled from the files and they're all still the correct file sizes.
So, basically, I'm not sure what's going wrong. Is there some critical step I've missed? Should I use a different utility to rename the files, like MediaRage? Basically, is there any easy way to deal with this problem?