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Did your computer crash and all your music is only on your iPod? Do you want to transfer all of your MP3’s from your iPod to a new PC, or use your iPod to transfer some songs to your work computer? You don’t need to purchase special software as some people will lead you to believe. If you have Microsoft Windows, iTunes, and an iPod (set to show up as a removable drive); That’s all you need! I’m going to walk you through the steps needed to do this.

Set Windows to show hidden files

Right click on your [START] button and select “explore”. Click on [Tools] at the top, then “Folder Options…”. This will bring you to a windows with customizable folder options. At the top, click the “View” Tab then scroll down halfway. Click on “Show hidden files and folders” and uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types”.

Find songs hidden on your iPod

Plug your iPod into your PC via the USB cable. The iPod should show up as a removable drive (for example purposes, we’ll call it the E: drive). Go to “My Computer” and then press your F3 key to pull up a search sub-window. Choose “All files and folders” if a little dog asks you any questions. Then, fill out the form as shown in Figure3 and click “Search”… This will show you all the MP3’s that are on your iPod. Yes, they have weird names, but the song tags (Title, Artist, Genre, etc) are all still there. iTunes will rename them with their tag information when you import them.

When it is done searching, select them all by pressing “CTRL %2B A” and copy them (right click -> copy) all into a new folder on your desktop (right click on your desktop and select New -> Folder). Copying may take a while depending on how many songs you are moving around. Once they are done copying, go to the next step.

Import the songs using iTunes

Install the latest iTunes if you don’t already have it (refer to the apple documentation), then open iTunes. Immediately, click on [Edit] at the top, then click on Preferences. Once the window pops up, click on the Advanced tab and make sure “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” are selected (VERY IMPORTANT). Then click Ok.

Now you will import all the music you copied. Click on [File] at the top and select “Add Folder to Library”. It will ask you which folder to add. Navigate to your desktop and select the New Folder you created that contains all your music, then click OK.

Relax and let iTunes work

Thats it! As it imports, iTunes will use the tags to rename the songs to the correct information. Don’t forget to delete the New Folder on your desktop when you are done. You no longer need these because iTunes copied them all to its own internal folder in your My Documents -> My Music folder.

Sincerely,
Chris Tolson
CTOLSON1978@tGMAIL.COM

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Tags: Apple, Computer, How To, iPod, iTunes, MP3, Music, Windows

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 8:17 pm and is filed under iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.