Anyone know about ipod & itunes? Since having a total HD failure and reinstall of windows, everything erased from my HD's I want to rinstate my Ipod music back onto the HD.
The ipod does not seem to want to do it even though the new pc (as it seems to the ipod) has been 'authorised'.
I'm not very au fait with the ipod software so any help is greatly appreciated, but please laymens terms and slow obvious steps are needed!

You could try Anapod Copy Gear.
I used the Anapod Explorer for a while, its very easy to use and much more confortable than iTunes.

Floola is nice, cross-platform too.

Can any of them copy music off an ipod back onto your HD though? IIRC, an iPod will not let you copy music onto your computer, even if it is the same computer you put it onto the ipod with. "Copy protection" crap...

I had a quick look at the Floola site, it claims you can copy back off ipod onto pc, be good to hear if anyone has actually tested this though. Maybe I'll try it out tonight.
Not a huge fan of the ipods although they look cool, I got a 4gig one free on Lufthansa air miles and won a 1gig one last Xmas at a school raffle

AFAIK it's not easy getting the music back off the ipod. You need some 'special' software to do it.

Most people I know who own these contraptions have hacked the crap out of them before putting any music on them at all. Is definitely possible to do what the manufacturer doesn't want you to do AFAIK.

I'd recommend Rockbox for your iPod, I believe it works on the smaller one, I know it works on the bigger HDD models. Anyway, it's a neat, cross platform firmware for MP3 players. I have it on my Toshiba gigabeat, it allows me to play videos, which the originial firmware didn't, there's a bunch of other stuff it does too, including play the original Doom in all it's 3D glory

Anyway, check it out

But have you used it successfully to transfer song files from the ipod to a new computer?

Quote from Davo :

AFAIK it's not easy getting the music back off the ipod. You need some 'special' software to do it.

Foobar 2000 and a plugin called foopod - it's an iPod manager for Foobar2000.

You can only put the songs back on your pc that you've bought with iTunes. You'll need a special app for the other songs.

Quote from al heeley :

But have you used it successfully to transfer song files from the ipod to a new computer?

Never used an iPod period, well, I've played with friends' iPods, but never transfered anything. I wasn't suggesting Rockbox to take tracks off, either, but as an alternative to the normal firmware.

Thanks for the constructive advice.
Mediamonkey works well, it allows me to take the files back off the ipod, store and play them on the pc and transfer to the second ipod, mix them with mp3 tracks from my 20gig philips hdd player, back up all the stuff on all three and wake me up with a cup of tea and warm bagel in the morning too. Great value for money. It's free.
Total Konfusion wins todays' award for his advice. Theres a Czech in the post. Thanks!

Glad you got it sorted Al.. I'll be checking the post every morning now


Regards,

Ian

Excuse my iPod ignorance...but can you not remove tunes from it?

So effectively I could remove iTunes completely and just run MediaMonkey instead? And I would also have the added capability of being able to remove tracks from my iPod.

How does it seem Al? You think you will be removing iTunes yourself?

The only reason I run iTunes is to synchronise, I still use Win MP to rip the CDs as it gets all the data including the album covers without having to register.

Another iPod question: When you are charging your iPod from your computer does it take friggin ages? I think I noticed that it charges quicker if you have iTunes loaded, which is a tad annoying but it does make some sense. I guess the USB port has to be set to charge by iTunes?

Thanks

MediaMonkey can syncronise with an iPod (and other devices AFAIK). I also use it as a replacement for winamp as it can monitor multiple dirs for changes (no need for winamp's bloated media library) and has a built-in player.

MM can also rip CDs and seems it has at least some methods of displaying covers (I use CDex to rip CDs personally as it handles multi-format CDs but doesn't do covers, but MM may aswell, not tried (yet?)).

It's free though, so I'd definitely say worth a look even if you uninstall it next week

FWIW, I'm not affiliated.. just an app I came across a few months ago and decided that I liked it.



Regards,

Ian

Quote from 96 GTS :

I'd recommend Rockbox for your iPod, I believe it works on the smaller one, I know it works on the bigger HDD models. Anyway, it's a neat, cross platform firmware for MP3 players. I have it on my Toshiba gigabeat, it allows me to play videos, which the originial firmware didn't, there's a bunch of other stuff it does too, including play the original Doom in all it's 3D glory

Anyway, check it out

I double that. I have an Ipod mini 2g myself and it works perfectly!

Better things in Rockbox:
You can play more codecs (10 including ogg and flac)
Gapless playback
5-band fully-parametric equalizer, and crossfeed
High-resolution volume control, 64-100 levels (model-dependent)
Abilty to create your own themes or use user-uploaded ones
Advanced crossfading
ReplayGain support (volume normalization)
JPEG image (Also in grayscale!) and text-file viewing
Doom!
Very much languages
Many plugins

And much, MUCH more.

Have a look here for feature comparison: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/FeatureComparison

A few rockbox qs

1. Is it easy for a dumbass to uninstall if I **** it up?
2. Would I need to put all my songs on again?
3. I assume I would need to burn the small amount of ITMS protected stuff to a CD and rip it again, right?
4. Does it play WMA-DRMs?
5. Can you show me just a pic of what it looks like?
6. If I bother, how long/difficult is it to install?

mediamonkey seems to work fine on all levels. Itunes still tries to boot up when i plug in my ipod, but all the songs from 2 ipods plus my philips hdd have been dragged off them and onto my PC's HD, from where I can decide which get copied back onto the different machines.

Quote from duke_toaster :

1. Is it easy for a dumbass to uninstall if I **** it up?
2. Would I need to put all my songs on again?
3. I assume I would need to burn the small amount of ITMS protected stuff to a CD and rip it again, right?
4. Does it play WMA-DRMs?
5. Can you show me just a pic of what it looks like?
6. If I bother, how long/difficult is it to install?

1. Depends how dumb you are but it's generally pretty easier, varies between mp3 players of course.

2. No

3. No idea, but paying for low quality crippled music is not my idea of wise spending, when a CD is often cheaper. Doesn't get round the sometimes butchering and almost always over compressed production some albums have but meh.

4. Don't think so, I don't have any music in WMA format, let alone with DRM in, so haven't tried it personally. Having a look on the website is probably best (for all your questions )

5. There should be various screenshots online about somewhere, but the look changes alot depending on the theme.

6. Takes a couple of minutes

Quote from Bob Smith :

4. Don't think so, I don't have any music in WMA format, let alone with DRM in, so haven't tried it personally. Having a look on the website is probably best (for all your questions )

Last time I looked (quite a while ago tbf, rockbox couldnt play ANY wmas as the decoder license from M$ is quite expensive IIRC). Which was a problem for me as I have a lot of wmas from my ripped cds.

No WMA, no DRM for rockbox unfortunately. I'm dual booting mine right now though, so I have the best of both worlds

Dual booting your MP3 player? Are you serious?

Yup, I run both Rockbox and the original firmware, and it works just fine

I have a Toshiba Gigabeat F20 by the way

Dual booting is a bit sketchy though, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the Gigabeat build is only a few weeks old, it's better supported on other MP3 players

Yer dual booting works fine on my iriver H320. So tbh no wma support isnt actually really an issue lol. So there you go. And now we've wandered off topic quite a bit...