My Library! Its being held prisoner! Oh, sob, all my lovely ratings....

September 11, 2006 8:39 PM

Had PC, got Mac, want to get ALL my songs + metadata off my iPod and into my Mac library. Have tried a few programs and they didn't work out exactly right. Your recommendations please!

I tried this a couple of weeks ago and I tried Senuti and iPodRip and neither of them worked (although I can't remember how, maybe one errored, one didn't copy playcount or something). So what programs do you guys recommend? I NEED my ratings, playcount, last played date, as I have tons of smart playlists based on them.

posted by Brainy to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Do you still have access to the PC with the iTunes library on it? If so, wipe out the iPod and just use it as a hard drive to move the iTunes folder from the PC to the Mac. Then you can re-sync the iPod.

Better instructions available here.
posted by toddshot at 8:57 PM on September 11, 2006

Hmmm.... Senuti has worked great for me. You might also look at iPodDisk, although I am not positive it would copy ratings and playcounts.
posted by blueplasticfish at 9:37 PM on September 11, 2006

I have a similar problem, but instead of moving from PC to Mac I would like to move the songs off the iPod onto my PC. I previously didnt have the hard drive space to hold an iTunes library on my laptop so I updated my iPod manually.

It's annoys me to no end that I cant do this with iTunes. The reason why I bought an iPod was for the most awesome metadata mechanics, but there is no way i'm going to re-rip and tag 6000 odd songs again.

...

Oh, i went into rant mode, sorry.
posted by a. at 9:47 PM on September 11, 2006

I use Share pod with my PC. Its always kept the metadata intact when transfring music OFF the ipod. Dont think its Mac compatible though.
posted by gergtreble at 10:44 PM on September 11, 2006

My vote is for Senuti. It preserves song metadata by using your iTunesDB file.
posted by Third at 9:54 AM on September 12, 2006

I also use Senuti without issue. Give it another shot, Brainy.
posted by dobbs at 10:54 AM on September 12, 2006

If you normally let iTunes manage your library anyway you don't need ANY of these programs. Turn on disk use and you can open the directories with the mp3s on the iPod directly. Copy them off, in total, to your desktop or somewhere else. Then use iTunes' add directory option.

If iTunes is copying the files from their origin location then it'll copy them out of that whackjob A01..A29 (or whatever it is) layout and organize them nice and pretty in your documents folders. Then you can kill the stuff on your desktop and go on with your life.

This WON'T save your playlists, however, just the MP3 files.
posted by phearlez at 2:10 PM on September 12, 2006

Apple actually has instructions for this -
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300173

Looks like it would work great.
posted by sluggo at 3:47 AM on September 15, 2006