Friday, September 09, 2005

Copy your music off your iPod to another computer

Apple obscures the mp3 and aac files on your iPod to make it difficult to copy them. They actually rename the fils and folders to things like AVKH.m4b instead of whatever you have the file named on your computer. I suppose Apple does this due to pressure from the RIAA - I don't know. All I know is my music that I bought legally is being held hostage.

Here is a geek way to deal with it:

1. open up the terminal and change to the root drectory of the iPod. It will be at /Volumes/the_name_of_our_iPod. Mine is called Geoff's iPod. So I issued this command:
$ cd /Volumes/Geoff\'s\ iPod

2. Next make a folder callled mp3s (or whatever you want) on your Desktop

3. Run this command from the Terminal:
$ find . -name *mp3 -exec cp {} /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/ghank/Desktop/mp3s/ \;

substitute your username for ghank and the name of the folder you made in step for mp3s.

The files will still be renamed to things like QUCD.mp3 but at least you have them.

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