I recently got my sisters iPod Mini and wanted to get its songs onto my iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t let you just copy music from a strange iPod to your library…or does it?
- Connect the iPod to your PC via the USB cable. If iTunes starts up automatically and begins to synchronize, make sure you stop it by clicking the (X) in the right hand corner of iTunes display.
- Now open your My Computer and locate the iPod drive (it’ll be the next alphabetically available drive) that should have mounted by now.
NOTE: If you don’t see your iPod drive in My Computer, you can also get to the iPod contents using the Control Panel->Portable Media Devices->Your iPod. - From the folder menu choose Tools->Options and in the View tab, check “Show hidden files and folders” radio button and click OK.
- Now navigate to the Music folder in the iPod drive. On my sisters iPod, the path was F:iPod_ControlMusic
- There were a bunch of folders in there (F00, F01, F02, etc.), select them all and copy them to your computer (the desktop should be fine).
- When the copying is done, disconnect the iPod and open iTunes. In iTunes click Edit->Preferences. Click the advanced tab and check the “Copy files to iTunes folder when adding to library” check box and click OK.
- Now click File->Add Folder to Library… and browse to the folders you copied to your desktop in step 5. iTunes will copy the files to your own library and rename them appropriately. Once it is done you can delete the original F00, F01, F02 directories from your desktop.
That’s it. The iPod folder and naming structure is pretty strange, but each music file has the proper ID3 tag which iTunes will use to identify the song, artist and album information when it copies it to your library.