finally

November 15, 2004 2:29 PM

Copy your iPod contents to your PC! Mac users have been swearing by such products as iPodRip or iPod Access but now we in the majority can "backup" our tunes from our lil device onto our ibm-compatibles. take that shelbyville!
posted by tsarfan (23 comments total)

Um....how is this not possible within iTunes itself? Just turn off automatic update and you're good to go. Or am I missing something?
posted by amandaudoff at 2:37 PM on November 15, 2004

What's an iPod?
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:38 PM on November 15, 2004

Also iPodAgent. [no connection, haven't tried it]
posted by Armitage Shanks at 2:44 PM on November 15, 2004

This was possible on the iPod for Windows since introduction. I use ephPod to do it all the time.
posted by riffola at 2:44 PM on November 15, 2004

ipod? What, haven't you ever seen "invasion of the ibody isnatchers"?
posted by wendell at 2:45 PM on November 15, 2004

personally, I'm waiting for the "Spongebob Squarepants" skin for the ipod until I get one...
posted by wendell at 2:46 PM on November 15, 2004

I've also been doing this with Ephpod which I highly recommend, and before that with some stuff from iPodSoft (iPodAgent and PodPlayer). Being able to do this on Windows isn't really a new thing.

Ephpod is especially nice because I can add music to my iPod on my work machine without and home machine without dealing with iTunes illogical DRM iPod registering crap.
posted by eyeballkid at 2:48 PM on November 15, 2004

(at the moment, I'm using PodPlayer to play a playlist from my iPod in Winamp.)
posted by eyeballkid at 2:55 PM on November 15, 2004

*turns up Dino on the hi-fi, ignores prattling technophiles*
posted by monju_bosatsu at 3:03 PM on November 15, 2004

is this the same thing as syncing both to a mac AND a pc? i want to be able to do that....
posted by rio at 3:13 PM on November 15, 2004

There were people out there using ephPod to get iPods working with Windows even before Apple made them officially "Windows compatible". It's been around since late 2001: the author wrote it to work with his first-generation 5 GB iPod.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:33 PM on November 15, 2004

iPodAgent is really nice.
posted by dig_duggler at 4:09 PM on November 15, 2004

Of course, if you use something like an Archos GMini 400 or one of the HD-based iRivers, you wouldn't have these problems. You'd just plug your player into the USB port and it would show up as a read/write drive. And you'd have longer battery life and more capability (OGG, WMA, FM receivers).

Of course, you wouldn't have an iPod, and so, would be outing yourself as uncool.
posted by lodurr at 4:41 PM on November 15, 2004

Of course, on windows, all you have to do is turn on 'view hidden files', enable disk use on the iPod, and search for the song you want with explorer..
posted by ascullion at 4:53 PM on November 15, 2004

Seconding the above comment - I own a sane mp3 player that lets me do exactly as I please with it without relying on hacks and third-party software. Plug it in and it's ready to go. They are all just external drives after all. What's the big deal with doing the same on the iPod? I hate nanny hardware and software.
posted by meehawl at 5:05 PM on November 15, 2004

The iPod does show up as a read/write drive. I store other stuff on it all the time. The problem is that the songs are organized with a folder structure dictated by the iTunes/iPod database. Using Windows Find to search for a song would be great, if I wanted to only find one song at a time (and if the search in windows wasn't so dog slow.) Finding playlists, full albums or entire artist catalogs would be pretty much impossible in Win2k.

Seconding the above comment - I own a sane mp3 player that lets me do exactly as I please with it without relying on hacks and third-party software.

And that is where the iPod suckiness comes in. I like ephPod, but it'd be nice if I didn't need it.
posted by eyeballkid at 5:18 PM on November 15, 2004

Heck, even the iPod plugin for Winamp does this. And has for months now.
posted by teferi at 5:26 PM on November 15, 2004

as rosanne rosanadana said on snl... nevermind :)
posted by tsarfan at 5:32 PM on November 15, 2004

Of course, if you use something like an Archos GMini 400 or one of the HD-based iRivers, you wouldn't have these problems.

Of course, you'd have entirely different problems, like trying to figure out how to switch playlists without clicking through a dozen menus.

Of course, on windows, all you have to do is turn on 'view hidden files', enable disk use on the iPod, and search for the song you want with explorer.

Of course, it works exactly the same way on the Mac, except it's two steps instead of three.
posted by jjg at 5:38 PM on November 15, 2004

Ephpod -- a product I have previously sworn by -- corrupted the on-board iTunes DB last time I used it to get music off. I had to delete everything and reimport music from scratch. No idea why this happened, but I suspect it may have been the mix of .mp3 and .m4a files I had. Anyway, I have been a little reluctant to try anything (Windows-y) since, although I did have success with Senuti on my Mac recently.
posted by John Shaft at 6:56 PM on November 15, 2004

Using Windows Find to search for a song would be great, if I wanted to only find one song at a time (and if the search in windows wasn't so dog slow.) Finding playlists, full albums or entire artist catalogs would be pretty much impossible in Win2k.

Two options here to speed up searches:

1. Turn on the Windows Indexing service and set it to catalog the contents of the drive(s).

2. Use a music management software with a media library database and tight Windows File Explorer integration, such as Media Center.
posted by meehawl at 3:18 PM on November 16, 2004

1. Turn on the Windows Indexing service and set it to catalog the contents of the drive(s).

I wasn't aware that Windows Indexing stored ID3 tag info.

2. Use a music management software with a media library database and tight Windows File Explorer integration, such as Media Center

Or iTunes, bloaty piece of crap that it is.
posted by eyeballkid at 4:25 PM on November 16, 2004

I wasn't aware that Windows Indexing stored ID3 tag info.

Good point. You'll need to add an mp3 ID3 parser plugin to Indexing Service, something like MP3IFilter. This is pretty useful when you are remote and can't connect with a standard client to your mp3 library server. You can just use the regular Index Server query web page to skim the mp3s.
posted by meehawl at 6:19 PM on November 16, 2004