My laptop had a STD and I re-imaged it. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to load the 3,000 songs I burned onto my i-tunes from CD (purchased songs were transferred). I now realize this must be for copyright protection. Of course I sold the CD’s in 2005, but assumed that my i-pod was my back-up. Please help!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

 

 

If it's an older or Classic iPod (i.e. not a Touch), connect it to your PC then go to your Windows Explorer/My Computer and look for the iPod as an external drive. Make sure you have "Show hidden files and folders" selected in your Windows Explorer Folder Options (Tools Menu, Folder Options, View tab). Browse your iPod as an external drive. There should be a folder called iPod_control, or something similar (it's been awhile since I had to do this myself). All of the music files are in there, under sub-folders with names like 0001, 0002, etc. The filenames are probably all gibberish - things like QZA5B.mp3 - but if you play them they will work just fine. In fact you can even play around with your Windows Explorer folder options some more to add custom columns like Title and Artist under the detail view, but that's not really necessary unless you're looking for one particular song - and if you have a lot of them, that will take awhile.

Copy EVERYTHING under the iPod_control folder to a temporary folder on your hard drive (you need to have twice as much free space on your hard drive as the amount that your music takes up on your iPod). This will probably take awhile.

Now fire up iTunes. Make sure to go into the Import settings and select the options to have iTunes copy imported music files into your music library folder, and to create folders with the artist and album names and rename the MP3 files to include the song name. This will fix all of those screwy filenames when you reimport everything, so that you're able to actually browse around on your hard drive looking for a particular MP3 if you want to.

Now have iTunes import a folder (including sub-folders), and just browse to where you copied your iPod_control folder. Again, this will take awhile and you need to have enough free space on your hard drive to do it.

Finally, delete the temp folder where you copied the stuff off of your iPod, since now you should have another copy of everything under your iTunes music folder, with proper file and folder names. Make sure you back this all up to an external hard drive every month or so, to prevent this from happening again.

Disclaimers: (1) This won't work with the iPod Touch because I believe they don't let you browse to the ipod_control folder anymore. (2) This will not copy any custom playlists you have on your iPod to your PC. There are a bunch of utility programs that do that... I ended up having to pay for one because none of the free ones seemed to work properly. (3) This all assumes you're using a Windows PC or laptop; if you have a Mac, then I have no clue. Good luck! As someone who had this problem a couple years ago, I feel your pain.

 

Thank You^elessar,
I will give it a try on Sunday. It is a classic and with your detailed instructions I should be able to get things rolling again.

 

Mr Marco...

update us if you did it and if it worked. Tks.