The Nerdiest Place on Earth

There doesn’t seem to be a free third-party iPod manager out there that lets you get music from your iPod onto your computer. I figured out how to do it with just the command line.

These instructions have only been tested on Mac OS 10.6 but they may work with any UNIX-based system.

Step 1: Find the music on your iPod

1. Plug your iPod into your computer. If iTunes comes up and tries to talk to your iPod, just hit Cancel.
2. In iTunes, click on your iPod under DEVICES. In the Options area, there’s an option “Enable disk use”. Make sure that option is checked and click Apply.
3. Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).
4. Type ls /Volumes and press enter. You should see a list of items, one of those items being your iPod.
5. Type cd /Volumes/TheNameOfYouriPod/iPod_Control/Music/ and press enter. Now type ls and press enter. You should see a list of directories like F00, F01, F02 and so on. If you do ls F00, you’ll see a bunch of mp3 files with weird names like ABRV.mp3. Those are the mp3s on your iPod.

Step 2: Copy the music from your iPod onto your hard disk

To make sure the transfer happens safely, we’ll first copy the files into a temporary folder on your computer and then we’ll add the files to iTunes.

1. Type mkdir ~/Music/temp and press enter. This creates a new directory in your user’s Music folder.
2. Type cp -R . ~/Music/temp/. This will copy everything from the current folder—the one that contains all the mp3s—into your music folder. Warning: this can take a LONG TIME depending on how much music you have on your iPod (mine seemed to take about an hour for ~80GB). If you’re not familiar with how the command line works, it may appear as though the command line has frozen. Don’t worry – it probably hasn’t. It just won’t give you any feedback until it’s completely done running your command.
3. If you run ls ~/Music/temp, you’ll see all the “F” directories, but if you try to look at the temp folder in Finder, it won’t even be there. You can make temp visible by running the following command: xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Music/temp/. This will allow the temp folder (but not the “F” folders) to be seen in Finder. To see the “F” folders, run this command: find ~/Music/temp/ -type d | while read line; do "xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo ${line}"; done

Step 3: Copy the music into iTunes

Now that you have all the files on your hard disk, you can copy them into iTunes. Just open iTunes and drag the temp folder onto the iTunes icon in the dock. Again, this will take a long time, but you should end up with all your iPod’s music in iTunes.

When you copy your weirdly-named mp3s into iTunes, iTunes will automatically rename the files and organize them according to their ID3 tags in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/. After that’s done you can safely delete the temp folder.

Enjoy!