Ok, so I am having computer problems, and I am thinking about wiping te computer. Main thing that is holding me back, is that I have ALOT of songs on my ipod, and if I wipe my computer, I will lose them all. SO, my question is, After I wipe my computer, can I then reinstall itunes, and then hook up the ipod, and recover my songs somehow?

 

from what ive done with itunes i dont think you can..what you should do is just copy and paste all of them to an external hard drive..thats what i did. i had to get mine wiped, and i have over 12,500 songs. so i got a 320gb (didnt need one that big but it was a good price) and they have been on there ever since

 

1.Connect the iPod to your PC. If iTunes starts syncing (ie erasing) your music automatically, hit the X in the upper right hand corner of iTunes display, to the left of the search box, to stop it.
2.In Control Panel, Portable Media Devices, double-click your iPod.
3.In the Tools menu -> Options, in the View Tab, check "Show hidden files and folders."
4.Navigate to the Music folder. On my 2nd gen 'pod, the full path is
Portable Media Devices\GINA'S IPOD (F:)\iPod_Control\Music
5.Select all the music folders, and drag and drop them into a folder on your hard drive, or directly into iTunes.

 

F150fella, that sounds like a great idea. Would be beneficial in the long run too. How much do those run, and what is a good brand/type to go with?

 

external hard drive is the way to go. there very cheap now. i have this one, but in black. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Seagate+...=1218009475263

 

So, I just hook it up and click and drag my song folders, and picture folders?

 

ya you can put anything on those. They are much needed these days.

 

Lucky for me I am a Network Coordinator... so I got SANs, servers, and everything at my disposal... so I've got unlimited (petabytes) storage.

But for the average user, the External Hard drive is a blessing.

 

I didn't understand a word you just said.

 

sorry i didnt get back to you sooner..im glad i got mine..those 12k worth of songs really take up alot of space on my computer.

i have a WD 320gb one it was about 85 bucks last year..you can get a 1TB for around 100 now.

the only thing i dont like about mine is you have to plug it into the wall for power, instead of just plugging it into the computer..other than that it is easy, just copy everything over to the hard drive..it may take a little while to copy songs over if you have as many as i do..plus i have about 90 youtube videos on there too..

and then delete them off of your computers drive and get'r cleaned!

 

This works, you're going to lose playlists, but all of your songs will be there. What you need to do after the above is go in to Itunes Preferences and select both Let Itunes organize my media AND copy files to music library when adding to the library. This will take those hidden scrambled songs, reorganize/rename them based on their ID3 tag info, and put them in your music folder you've selected for Itunes. After that's all said and done go ahead and delete that hidden folder of music you copied from the ipod and you're set. FYI, you will lose your playlists, so export those before you wipe the PC.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Unlimit.../dp/B0021AG04C

That is what I use for an external hardrive , I have about 4 internal HDD that I just hot swap. Its hooked up esata so it will transfer just as fast as having it internal, 3gb/s. Its much cheaper to go this rout than actually buying an external drive, and most external drives use the cheapest hdd they can so the fail rate on them is fairly high.

 

This kinda goes along with a problem I have. Our computer crashed the other day and we had our itunes on there. We ended up buying a new Imac. I realize we probably have lost all of our itunes music at this point. When we hook our Ipods up to our new comp its saying we are not authorized to to transfer the music from our Ipods to the computer. It shows the music that was in our library but it wont let you access it. Does this mean that all hope is lost and so is our music?

 

If you sync your iPods with your new Mac, you will lose your music. I'm not sure how to copy the files from your iPod to your Mac's harddrive, but I did it on my PC using ifunbox.exe. I couldn't access the files on my iPhone directly through my PC, so I had to resort to using that program. I just copied them onto my desktop, opened iTunes and re-imported them.

There should be a similar program that would work on a Mac (one would think).

 

I used EphPod to transfer mine to the computer.