This essay will explain the steps you will take to copy your music files from an iPod and put them onto a PC hard drive using Windows XP. In these steps you will: copy files from your iPod, transfer them to your computer, and reorganize them in iTunes. This is useful if your hard drive is damaged and your data is lost, if you’ve accidentally deleted your music library, or if you’d like to get free music off your friend’s iPod. Before outlining the process step by step, the following is a brief description of how iTunes stores music files on your iPod to thwart file sharing.
ITunes attempts to deter sharing music files by employing an encryption function which renames music files with seemingly random letters, shuffles the file order, and disperses those files throughout the myriad subfolders in the iTunes music folder of your iPod. This effectively scrambles the files making it impossible to identify song titles, album titles and the artists who recorded them. The keys to unscrambling the files, restoring their original names and returning them to their original, coherent organizational structure are kept within the iTunes and iPod software. Each time you sync your iPod to iTunes, the current content of the iPod is matched against the encryption key that iTunes is expecting to recognize. ITunes will immediately begin to delete any songs that do not match up. This is to prevent people from trading music “illegally” by adding songs to their iTunes libraries from other people’s iPods. Fortunately, you can get around this by following these steps.
To transfer music files to your computer directly from your iPod, you must first make sure that Windows Explorer is set to allow you to view hidden files. To do this, open Windows Explorer, click ‘Tools’, then ‘Folder Options’, and then click on the ‘View’ tab. A list of options will appear. Scroll down until you see the ‘Hidden Files and Folders’ option. Click on it and select the ‘Show hidden files and...