I remember back in 2001, when I was home from college one summer, I rented quite a few movies. Every time I went to the movie store, the same thing puzzled me: why was there so much space wasted? Many of the independent movies I wanted to watch at the time were hard to come by in Omaha, Nebraska, and the fact that a 3,000 square foot movie store didn’t have enough variety added insult to injury. “Instead of a movie store, it should just be a giant vending machine full of movies.” Nowadays, there are Redbox vending machines in every grocery store, full of movies. keep on reading »
My post about transferring my iTunes library got a lot of traffic, and a lot of great comments in which people shared their experiences and expanded on my advice. The post still gets a lot of hits, and people have been asking me for the best techniques of moving music off your iPod onto your computer. Being neck-deep in writing a book, I haven’t a lot of time to experiment directly with the various methods yet, but I thought it would be helpful to round up some resources and talk about the leading techniques that are out there.
Apple doesn’t want you taking music off your iPod and putting it onto a computer, because they’re worried about unauthorized trading. But if your hard drive crashes and take your entire music collection, being blocked from shifting your iPod contents back onto your new laptop is going to be infuriating. Fortunately, there are ways.
The Do-It-Yourself Windows Solution
If you’re trying to get your music onto a Windows machine, it’s not so hard. Windows thinks of your iPod as a simple storage device, and if you know how to find the files, you can grab them as easily as you’d pull them off a thumb drive.
For step-by-step instructions, check out Method One in this easy-to-digest article. That 2007 article is a little outdated — it goes on to suggest several software programs that are no longer available — but its instructions for getting into your iPod’s hidden music folder (where everything will look like alphabet soup) are still good. Depending on your version of Windows, finding the hidden files might be slightly different process (in Windows 7: After clicking on the iPod under My Computer, click on Folder Options, and under the View tab, select “Show hidden files, folders, and drives.”)
But pay attention to that initial step about not having your iTunes set to automatically sync your iPod, or the first thing you do will be to wipe your iPod clean. The writer here had only tested the technique with music files, which works fine (although you lose the metadata). I haven’t tested it yet with videos and other media.
This video also outlines how to browse – and transfer from – your iPod as if it were just another hard drive:
If you’re looking to get the iPod content onto a Mac, you’ll need a software program that will do it for you.
Free Software Solutions
If you want a program that will transfer music from iPod to PC without you having to do the backdoor work yourself, Sharepod comes pretty highly recommended. Download.com gives it a glowing review, and the program promises to grab songs, pictures, videos and other content, as well as your playlists, album art and ratings, from your iPod (or iPhone) and pull them to your PC.
Floola is a freeware program that offers to do a lot of things besides copy music off your iPod, from copying YouTube videos to synchronizing with your Google Calendar. Comments I’ve seen are strongly positive but, like any free program, slightly mixed. Check out reviews at Download.com and Lifehacker for starters.
If music is your only problem, FreeSync for Mac will readily move the files. If you’ve got video, photos, etc., the maker will want you to pay for the more robust version (see below).
Another free solution is iPod Folder, which works for both PCs and Macs. The drawback: Not only does it not do video, it only handles MP3 files, so if you’ve purchased music from the iTunes store, or ripped your CDs into any format other than MP3, this one won’t help you.
Solutions You Can Pay For
There are a number of programs you can buy for, of course. They’ll usually start you out with a free demo that gives you a number of days and songs before you need the license. I’m limiting the scope of this quick survey to free solutions, but here are a couple of pay-to-play programs that kept popping onto my radar:
One leading contender is Senuti, which gives you 30 days or 1,000 songs free before asking $18 for a license. Here’s a full review that walks you through the process of transferring your music from iPod to Mac.
iSkySoft, whose FreeSync for Mac moves songs for free, offers to get everything off your iPod with either of two programs, SyncPod for Mac, which will run you $39, or SyncPod for Windows, whose lower price tag ($19) may be due to the greater number of free solutions for the PC user.
What Else Have You Got?
I won’t get around to actually experimenting with these programs and techniques until either the book hits the shelves or a hard drive failure wipes out my iTunes library, but until that great or disastrous day, this post should get you started. If you’ve used any of these programs or techniques, or have a different or better solution, comment away!
While the 00’s are being called a lost decade for the US economy, there’s no doubt that it was a decade of incredible changes in technology, communication, and the way we see the world. I’ve compiled a list of my favorite books that define a decade that was full of exciting changes for the world, as well as for myself. I have to admit that sometimes difficult to separate the enormous personal changes I experienced in this decade – which was a coming of age one for me – from those of the world. Fortunately, they aren’t mutually exclusive. So, here they are: the eight books that define the decade, in an order that seemed intuitive to me. keep on reading »
I recently saw a piece by Jason Fried about how he works, and I found it pretty interesting. To truly be yourself for a living, you have to find a work style that makes the most of your natural ways of operating. I think I’ve developed some eccentric but effective working habits over the past few years, so I thought I would be fun to share them similarly. keep on reading »
Wouldn’t it be nice to be yourself for a living? You would spend every moment doing something you wanted to be doing. You would personally like and care about every person with whom you interacted; and they would feel the same way about you. You would be where you wanted to be, when you wanted to be there. Yet magically, every one of those actions, and every one of those relationships, would operate within a beautiful system that gave you financial security, and an overall happy, healthy, and wealthy life. keep on reading »
I believe we are deep in “The Age of Maybe“. Chances are, you have hundreds of Facebook friends, and thus many social engagements that you are invited to through Facebook, evite, or Meetup. With social connections so much looser than they once were, it makes RSVPing Maybe to these things very easy to do. You want to see who else will be going. You want to see if something better will be going on that day. You probably won’t admit that these are the reasons why, but at any rate, you RSVP Maybe. keep on reading »
There are plenty of ways to tie a winter scarf; but after a friend showed me this method, I don’t think I’ll ever tie a scarf another way again. Most scarf tying methods I’ve found are bulky and uneven; but this method yields a knot that distributes the mass of the scarf evenly. So, it looks dandy underneath your winter coat. keep on reading »
The SXSW panel picker is live for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. This year, I submitted the panel idea, How to Fuck Up Properly, where we’ll explore just how integral failure actually is to success; and how to tell the difference between failure, and lack of follow through. It will be a great panel, and I promise not to fuck it up; but, it can’t happen without your vote. Please vote now!keep on reading »
Inspired by the great pictures of food that people tweet using services such as TwitPic, myself and some friends have collaborated on nom.ms, a photo-sharing site especially for food lovers. With nom.ms, you can Tweet what you eat – and share recipes and restaurant info – simply by sending a photo of some food to new@nom.ms. And to sign up – well, do the same thing: send a photo of a dish to new@nom.ms. Once you get your nom.ms account hooked up to your Twitter account (we wouldn’t dream of asking for your Twitter password), we’ll start tweeting the subject line of your e-mail. The body will be used as a description for your nomm. Start nomming some nomms today, and tell your friends so you can nomm nomms with them, too!
I believe we are deep in “The Age of Maybe“. Chances are, you have hundreds of Facebook friends, and thus many social engagements that you are invited to through Facebook, evite, or Meetup. With social connections so much looser than they once were, it makes RSVPing Maybe to these things very easy to do. You want to see who else will be going. You want to see if something better will be going on that day. You probably won’t admit that these are the reasons why, but at any rate, you RSVP Maybe. 
The SXSW panel picker is live for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. This year, I submitted the panel idea, 
Remember my 
Inspired by the great pictures of food that people tweet using services such as