If you own an iPod then you might have tried copying your music from your iPod to your computer. Well and I am pretty much sure that in no time you might have realized that you can’t simply drag and drop your songs from your iPod into your computer. In order to respect the copyright of the music, videos and other stuffs apple has made it quite difficult to copy or transfer the songs from your iPod to iTunes or your computer. In this article we are going to teach you how you can transfer music to iTunes from your iPod.
By using any third party software or application
Many third party software developers have realized this dilemma and have launched their own set of software that could do the job for you. There are many iPod music transfer programs available in the market these days. These programs allow easy transfer of the contents of your iPod into your iTunes library i.e. into your computer. I personally prefer Cucusoft iPod/iPhone/iTouch to Computer Transfer whenever I need to transfer my songs from my computer to iPod or from my iPod to my computer. This software is very easy to use and the best part of the deal s that they comes for free.
This program is easy to use and can be used to backup and transfer all your songs, videos and other stuffs from your iPod classic, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod touch and even from your new iPhone. You can transfer all your data, video, movies, songs, images and even your playlists from your iDevice to your computer in an easy way.
You can download it free from here.
Use you iTunes to transfer your songs
Wouldn’t it be good if you could be able to transfer all of your music libraries via iTunes itself. Here we will discuss on the ways to transfer all your stuffs by iPod.
There is something you should consider in mind before using iTunes to transfer your music. Windows doesn’t recognize a MAC OS formatted disk. So, you can’t use a mac formatted iPod on a window device.
First you will need to switch you iPod to manual update from the automatic and you will also need to grant the permission for disk use.
- Open iTunes on your computer.
- Now connect your iPod to the computer and wait for it to appear in the iTunes.
- Select your iPod from the devices section at left side of the iTunes, to show your iPod preferences.
- Now look for the summery tab in the appeared window.
- Now look for the “manually manage music”, select the checkbox. This will also enable the disk use option.
- Now a message will appear stating that you will need to umount the iPod manually each time you will disconnect it from a computer, if you tries to enable the manually manage music option. Click on the Ok button to conform your decision.
- Now click on the apply button on the right side bottom of the window, to let these changes takes place.
Locate the iTunes media folder
In this step we will locate the iTunes media folder and will make sure that all of the content is in the same location. This will help us to extract them easily and we will not have to search from folders to folders to look for some particular file. We can find the iTunes media folder location from the preferences menu.
- Go to iTunes and open iTunes preferences in case of MAC. For windows you will find the preferences options under the edit menu.
- In the preferences menu look for the advance tab and open it. Under the advance tab, look for iTunes media folder location. In the box you will find the location of the iTunes media folder.
- If you are getting problems in completing these steps, you will need to make sure that all the new stuffs get added to the iTunes media folder. Now select the checkbox stating copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library. This will ensure any content does go to media library.
- To conform the changes you have done click on Ok.
- Now you will need to consolidate your library, this will send all your files to iTunes media folder. Now go to files and from the menu choose library and then organize library and after that you will need to click on the consolidate files.
- A window will appear warning you that changes cannot be undone. Click on consolidate.
- Once the consolidation process is over, quit iTunes.
Using consolidation will cause iTunes to copy all your files to a different location on your computer. So, if you don’t have enough hard disk space, this method will not work properly. Please free up some drive space before executing consolidation.
Copy files to another computer from your iPod
Now we will guide you for the steps you could use to transfer all your music files, audio, video, movies, and even library and playlist files to another computer.
- First make sure this computer does have the latest version of the iTunes installed.
- Drag your iTunes folder to your desktop. You can find it at \Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\ in windows environment and mac users could find it at /Users/username/Music.
- Now look for the iPod on the computer. You will find it in computer or my computer option in windows and on the desktop in mac.
- Double click the iPod icon to open it and display its contents.
- Look for the iTunes folder in your iPod. Now drag this folder out of the iPod into either music folder in case of windows 7 or mac and if you are using XP then paste it into my music folder.
- This will take time if you have a lot of songs.
- Now go to iTunes and open it. You will find all your music files have been added to the iTunes library.
So, this how you can transfer music from your iPod to iTunes.