How to get music off a corrupted iPod

February 1, 2008 12:24 PM

How do I get the music off of my corrupted iPod?

Whenever I plug it in to iTunes it tells me its corrupted and to restore it. It freezes occasionally so I figured thats got to be true. Apple folks said the same. It also said something about formatting it for Windows. I'm not sure if doing that will mess up my music so I said no.
I don't have some of the music on my computer thats on there so I really want to get the music off before I restore it. Any programs I can use? Music Rescue didn't work. Help!

posted by grablife365 to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Senuti?
posted by xmattxfx at 12:26 PM on February 1

I guess you've tried everything at this point, but this exact same thing happened to me, I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and everything worked wonderfully. Before that, I was terrifed of losing everything.

One extra thing: sometimes if I plug the iPod to the computer with the "lock" on, it will tell me that the software to communicate with the iPod ain't working, so also make sure it doesn't have the lock on.
posted by micayetoca at 12:32 PM on February 1

xmattxfx - I have Windows or else that would be perfect. I have no idea why its asking me to format. Maybe cause of different versions of windows. Vista on the laptop and XP on the desktop? I don't know but thanks for that.
posted by grablife365 at 12:34 PM on February 1

Yamipod? I don't use ITunes, as it seems to be bloated.

www.yamipod.com Its free. It gets your music off. Its your friend. Apparently, it also repairs the drive of your ipod as well.

Itunes does give a message like that if it is an older version of Itunes.
Unplug you ipod, then try setting Itunes to read your Ipod in "disk only" mode. That may give you access to the pod to transfer music TO it.
posted by fox_terrier_guy at 12:36 PM on February 1

I'm at work so I can't remember the directory names, but if you have disk mode access on, you should be able to see your files in Explorer if you turn on hidden file display. The last time I looked the mp3's had random 4 letter names, in randomly named directories. You should be able to copy them off, then use Tag & Rename or MusicMonkey to give them meaningful names.

Unfortunately, the formatting messages might indicate that the drive itself is corrupt, so you might get disk errors when you try to copy things.
posted by rfs at 12:46 PM on February 1

If you can get it to mount your iPod as a hard disk in Windows using Disk Mode, you can then use SharePod to easily copy the music from your iPod to the PC.
posted by gemmy at 3:35 PM on February 1

Try Floola. I heart it. For seriously.
posted by santojulieta at 4:45 PM on February 1

There's a program at versiontracker.com that can take music off ipods. I haven't done it myself but my Mac guy did it for me when I bought my last new one (officially, Mac will tell you it can't be done). Anyway, have a look there. Good luck.
posted by heffalump at 7:46 PM on February 1

santojulieta - Thanks for the Floola link. It's exactly what I was looking for.
posted by hjo3 at 1:05 PM on February 8