I am all that is Dork!

So, as you all know, or should know, I was robbed. Twice. In the first robbery (evidently if you are not home, it is burglary, but it is cooler to say robbery, makes it more dramatic) the sons-a-bitches got my lap top. Now, losing my tax returns, having my accounts and passwords on there, various games loaded on there, and such was bad; but the worse thing was that all of my iTunes songs where on there. That sucked.

I was/am lucky that my iPod was in my truck for both break-ins. So, all of those songs that I purchased are still on my iPod. However, here is the problem, wait for it, steady: your iPod is sync’ed up to a particular version of your operating system. If you lose your computer, crash the hard drive, upgrade Windows, and various other calamity, you will not be able to get you songs from your iPod to your computer; and vice-versa.

This was the situation I was in. Now, there are several shareware, open source, and third party vendors that have programs that will ‘rip’ songs from you iPod to your PC; but I’m a cheap bastard (more truthfully, I couldn’t get them to install on Vista) and so I typed in “How to get songs from iPod to Computer Vista” into the Google search bar. After wading past all of the adverts and such, there was a nice Yahoo thread that told me to do the following.

1) Connect iPod
2) On iTunes control panel, select the iPod on the left pane
3) In the iPod section make sure that the “Enable Disk” function is checked for your iPod (evidently this selection makes it necessay to use the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ utility for USB devices
4) Open Windows explorer and select the iPod (called USB mass storage device, usually drive F:)
5) Under options for the select ‘Show Hidden Directories’
6) Go to the following Directories -> iPod Control -> Music
7) Copy the entire Music directory to a point on your hard drive
8) Open iTunes, go to the file button, select Import Files, browse to the new music directory, open each of the sub-folders (names F00, F01, F02, etc) and copy all of the files.
*Note: iPod gives the files random names, but it will be able to figure them out when it uploads them to iTunes.

Well, it took me more time than I would like to admit to figure that out (the whole ‘Enable Disk’ thing was beyond me); but I figured it out. So I am happy, because I saved all kinds of money in recovering the songs and I defeated the smarmy iTunes, and I remain King Dork.

Later,

B