Brent Kearney

Copy Music Off of Your iPod in Five Easy Steps

Posted on: April 19th, 2009 @ 17:37

These instructions explain how to copy files from your iPod to your Mac using the tools built into Mac OS X. There is plenty of 3rd-party software that can transfer files from iPods, for example EphPod for Windows and iLinkPod for Mac, but the method I will show you does not require 3rd party software. The procedure is basically this: use the command line to copy the randomly-named files from the iPod to a temporary folder on your Mac’s hard drive, then add them to iTunes to automatically re-organize and rename the files appropriately.

The copy process will require double the amount of disk space that is used on your iPod. So if you have 6GB worth of music on your iPod, copying the music off of your iPod will require 12GB worth of space on your computer — 6GB of storage for the files copied from the iPod, plus 6GB of temporary storage (which you can delete after).

1. Create a folder on your desktop that will temporarily hold the files from your iPod. To create a folder on your desktop, click your desktop, then select File -> New Folder.

New Folder
A new folder will appear on your desktop, and you can type in a new name for it. Name the new folder “ipod”.

2. Connect your iPod to your computer and open iTunes. An iPod icon should appear in the column on the left, under Devices. Note the name of your iPod. This will be important for later.

Click on the icon of your iPod. This should show you the summary screen:
Summary
Scroll down to the Options section, and make sure that the option to “Enable Disk Use” is enabled:

Options
Click the “Apply” button if the option was previously not enabled.

3. Open iTunes Preferences by holding down the command key (⌘) and pressing the comma key. Click the Advanced tab. Optionally change the “iTunes Music folder location” to your Music folder; this is where your music files will be stored. Check off the “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” option, and the “Copy files to the iTunes Music folder when adding to library” option.

prefs
Click the “Apply” button after making changes. Note that, from now on, when you add new music to iTunes, a copy of those files will be made in your Music folder. So remember to delete original files after importing to iTunes.

4. Copy & Paste the following text — not including the semi-colon (;) — into a Terminal window. That is, using your mouse, highlight the following line up to just before the ‘;’ at the end of the line, then press ⌘-c (or select Edit -> Copy) to copy it:


cp -R "/Volumes/My iPod/iPod_Control/Music/*" ~/Desktop/ipod/ ;

Open a Terminal window from your Applications -> Utilities folder, and press ⌘-v (or Edit -> Paste) to paste the text into it. Use the back-arrow key (←) to move the cursor to where it says “My iPod”, and use your delete key to replace “My iPod” with the name of your iPod, which you noted in step 2. So for example, if your iPod is named FooPod, the line in your Terminal window should look like:

terminal
When the command line looks like the above, except with your iPod’s name in place of FooPod, press the Enter key.

The temporary “ipod” folder on your desktop will begin to fill up with the files from your iPod. The files will have random names, like “ZTUG.mp3″ — don’t worry, that will be fixed in the next step! The copy process could take a long time, depending how much music you have on your iPod. This will in no way effect the contents of your iPod. It merely copies the files, it doesn’t change them.

5. Drag & Drop the “ipod” folder onto iTunes, after the files are finished copying from the iPod. iTunes will import the music and use the meta-data in the files to rename and organize them into an Artist -> Album -> Song hierarchy, in your music folder.

files
When iTunes is finished importing the files, you can delete the temporary folder (“ipod”). You’re done!

→ 8 comments
8 Comments:

  1. Brent on April 19th, 2009 @ 17:48

    A note on the semi-colon thing: I added the seemingly useless ‘;’ to the end of the command line so that people don’t select the end of the line, which would include an end-of-line character in the command, which is the same as pressing the Enter key. Then there wouldn’t be the opportunity to backspace and replace “My iPod” with the real name of the iPod.

  2. Johannes Gorset on April 22nd, 2009 @ 14:14

    ooh, that’s nice. There’s an application that used to do the same thing (well, except it would get the names right), but I don’t think it works with the latest iPod firmware update. This should prove useful.

  3. Rick Dye on June 17th, 2009 @ 21:17

    My son’s PC crapped out and we are desperate. I used your method to copy the files to a folder on my iMac desktop. I created an empty library (press apple button while opening iTunes.) I drag the folder to iTunes… and nothing happens. My desktop folder looks empy when I view it through finder but when I hit info on the folder it has 9.6 GB in it and an “ls” in a terminal session shows the sub folders and Mp3 and M4a files are there. Any ideas would be appreciated. Rick

  4. Brent on June 17th, 2009 @ 21:44

    Hi Rick,

    I think it’s Alt that you’re supposed to hold down when starting iTunes, to create a new library. Did you follow step 3, above, to set the import location to the new library, and to copy the files on import?

    I’m not sure what you mean about the desktop folder looking empty through Finder. If it’s empty, then how do you “hit info on the folder”?

    Cheers
    Brent

  5. Rick Dye on June 30th, 2009 @ 09:49

    Brent,

    Thanks for writing back. In Step 4, when you use “…desktop/itunes” I used “///desktop/tempitunes” This is where the files were copied off of the ipod. If I use finder to go to “desktop” I see the “tempitunes” directory. If I right-mouseclick on “tempitunes” and select “get info” I see that it is a folder that contains 9.66 GB on disk for 0 items? I I clcik on that directory, it looks empty. If I drag the folder to iTunes… nothing happens. If I open a terminal session and go to the desktop/tempitunes directory and run the “ls” command I see the sub folders “F00″ “F05″ F”10″ etc… and Mp3 and M4a files are in each of these. Am I in some sort of “permissions” hell? Rick

  6. Rick Dye on June 30th, 2009 @ 09:51

    If this becomes too much of a hassle, in order to help my son, I wouldn’t mind buying an app, I just want to be absolutely sure I am not buying anything that will load spyware, etc on my PC (or Mac.)

  7. Brent on June 30th, 2009 @ 10:24

    Hi Rick,

    Assuming that you have the folder location correct, try changing permissions on all files in your “tempitunes” folder, with:

    chmod -R +rw tempitunes
    sudo chflags -R nohidden,nouchg,noschg tempitunes

  8. Rick Dye on June 30th, 2009 @ 17:52

    You are da’ man… chmod and or chflags did the trick! thanks so much!




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