Music library disaster? How to rip songs from your iPod
Music library disaster? How to rip songs from your iPod
Despite the fact that Apple constantly "encourages" users to back up their music, people still often find themselves in the awkward predicament of needing to download their entire libraries back off of their iPods. Maybe they suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash, or perhaps their laptop was stolen and they no longer have access to their home libraries. Either way, people want to get their media off of their iPods and—through Apple-provided methods, anyway—they can't.
(Apple now allows you to transfer your purchased music from iTunes off of an iPod onto a new machine, but this only works for music you have bought from Apple. Any MP3s that you have ripped yourself or bought from other online retailers are not transferred.)
That's why third parties have swooped in to rescue aggravated iPod users on every platform. On the Mac, Windows, and even Linux, there are tools that allow users to grab their media—and some even work with newer devices, like the iPhone and iPod touch. Since the holiday season is nearly upon us and family members are starting to ask us questions about how to get music off of their devices, we thought we would do a rundown of software to use for this purpose.
