Recovering music from iPod after computer with iTunes dies?

Factual Questions
1

I had nearly 5000 songs in my Library on a computer that had a sudden Michael Jackson-like death. I did back them up to disk about a thousand songs back, but it would be a big pain to figure out what’s missing and track them down and restore them from the original CDs or wherever.

But the whole friggin library is also on my iPod, and it seems ridiculous that I can’t just install iTunes on a new computer and load it onto the new computer from the iPod. But iTunes Help onlyhas instruction on recovering the music you bought from their store. So I was able to recover 749 purchased songs.

Apparently in Apple World, computers never die and when you want to transfer your library fron one to another, both will be available, because those are the only instructions they offer,

Explorer is no help. It can’t see the music files on the iPod drive.

Anyone know of some utility that I can get for this? I’m even willing to spend some bucks to save myself a lot of hours of hassle,

2

If you have a mac, there’s a free program called Senuti which deals with exactly this. As a disclaimer, however, I must say that when I tried to use it, it would upload a good chunk of the songs then freeze. After a day of frustration, I ended up with all the songs I wanted on my computer, but many many many many many duplicates to sort through.

On my pc, several years ago, I used a similarly free program called EphPod. Both were obtained via a quick google of the name.

3

You could give this a try.

4

First of all, have you tried hooking your hard drive up to another computer? If this worked, it would certainly be the best solution.

5

Your music is on the iPOD in a folder \iPod_Control\Music. iTunes creates a folder structure “F00” to “Fnn” with each folder containing about 100 mp3 files with the file names changed to a 4 character naming convention. You can copy these files to your hard drive and rename and reorganize them using the metadata stored in the files and some utility program like “Tag & Rename”.

6

Sharepod will do it.

7

Sorry, I should have specified Windows Vista.

Good idea but drive is dead.

I was gonna say, “No such folder, or files. Maybe that’s how macs work.” But then I thought to check whether this new Explorer was set to display hidden files, and it wasn’t. So now, at least I can see the music files.

And no, the extensions do not appear to be modified. I can see wavs, mp3s, m4as, etc.

Thanks for the idea that the files might be hidden. I should have thought of it but didn’t. I think I can just drag them into my hard drive now.

Thanks to you other folks too. If dragging and dropping doesn’t work, I’ll look at some of the utilities you mentioned.