My laptop hard drive died on Christmas Eve. Since the laptop has been nothing but a pain in the ass for 3 years, and since I’m sick of not being able to play WoW without lots of lag, we decided it was time for me to get a new computer.
I got a desktop. I have an iPod. I want to get the stuff from my iPod (audiobooks, music not bought from iTunes, pictures, stuff bought from iTunes) on to my new computer. I authorized the new version of iTunes but since the iPod is synced to the old one, it wont let me sync without clearing out the iPod. It took me a long friggen time to get all that stuff on there and I really don’t want to go through all the CDs again.
Is there a way to deauthorize and desync the version of iTunes which is currently living in a $2000 paperweight?
My boyfriend does plan on replacing the hard drive and he thinks he might still be able to get some stuff off of the old one. But, it’s going to be months before he does anything with it and I’d really like to be able to sync my iPod before then.
I have looked through the iTunes help but I think they make it deliberately difficult to find anything so people will pay for extra support and I really don’t want to do that.
I just told myself about 2 weeks ago to back up my hard drive. I went so far as to back up my pictures but no farther than that. Silly me. :smack:
I am not in a spot to look it up but there are several applications for windows to transfer the music off an iPod back to a Pc at download.com and similar sites.
When you connect the iPod to your new PC and open iTunes do you get the option to ‘Enable disk use’? This should allow you to manually copy the music off it if memory serves me correctly.
The best approach might be to burn a CD with Ubuntu Live on it and use that to boot up your laptop, you can then copy your music off the hard drive of the laptop (provided the drive isn’t too badly borked) and get the iPod set up correctly. If you just copy the music off your iPod you may find it is in some god-awful incomprehensible folder structure/file naming system.
Plug your iPod into the new computer and start iTunes. Select your iPod in the list. Go to the File menu, “Transfer purchases from iPod”.
This should copy the music from your iPod to the new computer. Then you can sync with it from the new computer, without erasing what’s already on the iPod.
drachillix: Thank you. I never knew such things existed. I downloaded CopyTrans and it seems to do what I wanted it to do, except I can’t figure out where my audiobooks went. I did have this problem when I first went from the Audible Manager to iTunes though so I’m not surprised. I remember that way back when I first got an iPod (heh, way back when…it was 5 months ago), I had to call Audible to figure out what to do to make my stuff show up in iTunes. I just don’t remember now what it was I did.
mittu: Thanks. If CopyTrans turns out to be a bust, I’ll talk to the boyfriend about giving this a try.
tellyworth: I did that but it only added the stuff I bought from iTunes - in other words, one Enya album. The vast majority of the stuff on my iPod is pictures, audiobooks from Audible, and CDs we’ve owned for over a decade. I actually don’t have much music on there at all. I only have about 8 albums and some of them aren’t even complete.
That was actually one of the first things I looked at. I got discouraged by the note that the document isn’t for iPod Touch, which is what I have. Until today, I didn’t think it mattered which iPod I had.