V-Flyer

Trying to help a friend who lost their laptop today (failure, not theft). They have all their music synced on their iPod (I'm not sure which type just now, but I am guess most likely a touch).

Does anyone know a decent, preferably free, iPod music ripper that would let them rebuild their iTunes library.

I am almost 100% full time using a mac these days and as such I don't really know what's going on in the Windows area which is the operating my friend is using.

TIA

Paul

Is there any reason why iTunes isn't suitable?

I think I know what p17 is talking about. When my Windows crashed and I tried to sync my ipod to the new laptop, iTunes kept giving a message about formatting the "new" ipod and syncing it with my iTunes. Meanwhile I just wanted all my old songs that were on the ipod to be transferred to itunes?

On Windows I seem to remember there was an application called ePod... but that may not exist any more, or indeed be exactly what you need. But worth a quick search.

Theres an app called floola which will let you grab whats already on the ipod

http://www.floola.com/home/

It won't give you pretty file names, but will preserve the ID3 tags on the mp3's

Hope that helps.

Sharepod is pretty good at recovering what is on an iPod Touch, it allows you to read it like its another hard drive.

I'm mostly mac too now, and have no recent experience of this sort of sw on windows, but bottom line, it's pretty easy to pull out the music files, and almost any sw that claims to do this should work fine - all they are doing is letting you view your music files on the device. If you want the metadata, that gets a whole lot trickier: I didn't want to lose my playlists and playcounts when my old iMac drive fried, so needed to research a bit more for sw. But if it's just the music files you want, that should be pretty straightforward.

Just as a side note.

If you subscribe to iTunes Match (~ £24 a year in the UK), your entire iTunes library is uploaded to the iTunes cloud and is always available on any device (upto a max of 6 I think) so if you come across a hardware failure like this on any of your devices, once fixed, you simply turn on iTunes Match and then download your tracks back onto the device from the cloud (and this also includes playlists and metadata).

Whilst iTunes Match takes several hours to upload your library initially, it's well worth the money. Be careful though if you have a limited cellular data allowance with an iPhone, as iTunes Match can swallow up quite a bit of data (although you can disable cellular data for iTunes Match if you need to)

Note that there's a maximum size of Itunes Match that you can have. I can't remember what it is, but I know I'm above it

Why not just initialise the new laptop from its backup?(in mac land via the Time Machine..)

Regards

Peter