A friend recently deposited his iPod with me (mwahaha!) to look after until the nice man from AppleCare comes to take it away to be repaired (he lives in halls of residence and these things have a habit of.. disappearing..). He also wants to back up all the music on it in case Apple send him a replacement unit.
Now, I’ve heard some horrible stories about how hard it is to get music off the iPod due to attempts at media control, DRM, etc etc. So I dutifully set about using the wonderful multi filesystem support of the mount command in GNU/Linux to mount the iPod as a firewire hard drive feeling pretty confident that it would pay no heed to the DRM hoojum woojum that was likely to be present. Indeed, the iPod mounted with no problem and slightly shaky firewire support aside (you know who you are, sbp2), there was not much of a problem until I tried to copy a certain file from the device (just a random mp3, in case you were wondering) when the whole thing would grind to a halt and crash, necessitating a hard reboot (ouch..).
Not to be put off I decided to plug the iPod into my PowerBook and see what magic I could weave with the Terminal. To my surprise, exactly the same files were visible as on the GNU/Linux box, but not from the Finder. A quick download of TinkerTool, and hidden files were showing up in the GUI, no problem. It was then trivial to copy the files across.
The mp3 files on an iPod are kept in sequential folders in /iPod_Control/Music/F00-19 (on this iPod, YMMV) and are renamed XXXX.MP3 (where XXXX is a four digit number). A problem? No! Thanks to id3 tagging, when you copy the mp3s into iTunes, if you have it set to reorganise your music for you it will rename all the files and arrange them in a nice, logical order.
Looks like Apple’s famous ‘ease of use’ triumphs again - although a little bird tells me the same can be accomplished by viewing the iPod with ‘Show Hidden Files’ on with Windows. Either way, I am a little disappointed it didn’t put up more of a fight…
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