Stump the PC Club is a free tech-advice column written by members of the North Orange County Computer Club, which has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
QUESTION: I just got a new PC and I’d like to copy my iPod music to it. Is this possible?
PC CLUB: There are several ways to copy your iPod’s music to your PC even though it is not supported by iTunes. The first method is based on using your iPod as a disk drive. See the article at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1478 for information. Once this is set up you can just plug the iPod into your new PC, open the iPod in Windows Explorer, and enable the viewing of hidden files. For viewing hidden files; select the ‘Tools’ option on the menu bar of My Computer, select ‘Folder Options’, then ‘View’, click on the ‘Show hidden files and folders’ option, and then ‘OK’.
For this example, we’ll say the iPod mounted onto the G:\ drive. Navigate to G:\iPod_control\Music. In that folder will be subfolders named F00, F01, F02 and so on that contain all your songs — the files will have odd names, usually 4 random letters – however, the file information for each file contains the actual information, so you can also just access the files directly this way. If you save these oddly named folders and later bring them back into iTunes, all the information will be correctly restored since it’s stored with the folders.
The second method involves using a program called CopyTrans which is available at www.copytrans.net for $19.95. This is the easiest and best program for copying music from an iPod to anywhere on your PC including an external hard drive enabling you to copy the music to another PC. iTunes doesn’t need to be installed or running for this program to work, in fact it’s safer.
Note that when you plug an iPod into a PC running iTunes, it’s possible that iTunes will sync the iPod to your iTunes library. Depending on your settings, this may not be what you want. If you’re asked to sync, decline until you have your music safely backed up. I always select my iPod in iTunes, select the summary tab and check “Manually manage music and videos”. This will prevent accidental syncing. You only have to do this once since the setting will remain until you change it for the particular iPod.
Ed Schwartz is a member of the North Orange County Computer Club. To send in a question, go to edwardns.com and click the Contact Me menu. Archives of previous columns are also on the website.