Ripping your iPod to other Computers
How to move music files from your iPod to any other computer
This is one of the most requested features from the iPod community. It's a shame that you can't simply move music from the iPod to your computer using iTunes, but Apple has to suck up to the entertainment content providers and play ball with copy protection. The reason they didn't provide this is that the music studios believe you'll use this ability to give free music to all your friends and they won't buy their own copy.
Piracy is probably a legitimate concern. It's likely that a lot of bad music will float freely between kids, their iPods and their friend's computers. We won't condone freely sharing digital music. But, as long as you have good taste, perhaps we can look past any clandestine purposes you might have from the lesson you obtain from this page. There is precious little good taste left in the world.
Let's take a look at exactly how to move music from the iPod to your computer, using Windows and Mac OS. The first thing to understand about the musical content of your iPod is that the music itself is simply 'hidden,' so there is no real magic or hacking involved.
Windows
- Connect your iPod to your computer
- Run iTunes if it doesn't automatically
- Go to Edit - Preferences
- Select "Manually manage songs and playlists". This also opens up "disk use"
- Open My Computer from your desktop
- Go to the Tools menu, now select "Folder Options"
- Go to the View tab
- Click the radial button that says: "Show hidden files and folders"
- Now click OK on the Folder Options window
- In My Computer locate the iPod storage device (opened via disk use)
- Open the iPod_Control folder
- Inside you'll find the Music folder, your music is now free at last!
Mac
- Connect your iPod to your computer
- Run iTunes if it doesn't automatically
- In Preferences enable "Manually Mange Songs and Playlists" and "Enable Disk Use"
- In TinkerTool select the Finder Tab
- Enable Show Hidden and System Files, select Relaunch Finder
- Go to the Finder and double click the iPod icon on the desktop
- Now you have an iPod Control folder inside of which is your Music folder
- Now you can copy your music to Mac
There are of course other ways of doing this. Countless applications will do the same thing for you, including Winamp and Winamp's iPod plug in. For Mac there is an application called Senuti.