Free Your Music

Get Your Music Off of Your iPod

What You'll Need:

1. An iPod (obviously)

2. Either a Windows or Mac machine.

The simplest method for grabbing tunes off of your iPod is also the geekiest. Just enable the "Disk Mode" feature of the iPod from within iTunes, which will allow you to mount the iPod as a hard drive. Then, you can browse the disk using Windows Explorer or the Mac's Finder.

How To (Mac)

On a Mac, you'll need to enable hidden folders in the Finder.

1. Launch the Terminal by going to Applications > Utilities and double-clicking on Terminal.app.

2. Paste in these lines of code:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

3. If you ever want to make the hidden folders disappear again, just run the code again, but change TRUE to FALSE.

How To (Windows)

Similarly, you can copy songs from an iPod onto a Windows PC by enabling hidden folders to be viewed. Here's how.

1. Open your My Computer directory.

2. Double click on your iPod.

3. Go to Tools > Folder Options > View.

4. In the Advanced Settings list, under Hidden files and folders, check the radio button for Show hidden files and folders. Then click OK.

5. Go to iPod_Control > Music.

You'll see the iPod's music organized randomly into a bunch of folders. Copy those into your music directory. Although the filenames of the songs will be scrambled, their ID3 tags will be intact, so you'll be able to navigate the songs as usual on your computer or another iPod. While these slightly inconvenient methods work, there are plenty of software apps that make the process of browsing and copying files much easier.