Getting songs back off your iPod

Posted on: 15 January 2010

Apple make it easy-peasy to put your tunes onto your iPod or iPhone, via iTunes. But they go out of there way to stop you going in the opposite direction. If you've ever enabled your iPod for disk use and opened it up on your desktop, you'll see the way Apple has confuzzled it up enough to stop you cherry-picking songs from an iPod. Fair enough, you can grab the whole lot, but if you want just a couple, there are easier ways to do it.

I got my Macbook back yesterday, but despite the millions of employees inside each Apple shop, it seems none were organised enough to give me a calll and tell me it was ready. But that's the extent of my rant because overall I was pretty happy with the service. Applecare saved me the cost of labour & hardware to the sum of £130 - not bad, considering the care only cost me £50 in the first place. The first thing I did was restore my system back to the last backup I made in Time Machine - a painless and relatively quick process. After that, my laptop was almost in exactly the state it was a few months ago. Thanks Apple.

My iTunes was, however, a few months behind on songs. So, since I'd synced my iPod a few days before the hard drive gave up, I thought it attempt to get any recent songs off my iPod and seemlessly slot it back into my iTunes library. That's the good thing about iPods, or any MP3 device. In addition to music players, they are also portable external hard drives, which you can use to salvage your music collection if the hard drive decides enough is enough.

After a little bit of research, I downloaded Pod to Mac (Pod to PC is also available). It's free to use, but the features are limited until you register for the reasonable fee of $9.99. But for what I wanted, I kept with the free version. After I installed and fired it up I thought - perfect - that's exactly what I want.

But this story is unfortunately one of those kick yourself repeatedly stories. Moments before opening up the program I absentmindly plugged my iPod in. Not thinking anything of it, I let it do its thing - which unfortunately - in this instance - is sync.

Not realising my mistake at the time, I started searching for the songs I'd put on my ipod recently using the Pod to Mac software. What? None of them are here. Is this thing broken? Then it dawned on me.

Fortunately I managed to supress my rage enough that my Macbook and iPod are still in one piece. But suffice to say, after doing the necessary research and finding out there is an easy-to-use program that could do exactly what I wanted, I'd been in better moods.

So if you're ever in the same situation as me and need to retrieve some songs off your iPod, DO download the software I recommended, however DO NOT sync your iPod before you do it. Lesson learned I guess.