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You have this great collection of songs in your iPod meticulously selected over many hours. The videos have been downloaded over the Internet over a long period. Then the unthinkable happens — your computer crashes. And you have no backup. How are you ever going to get back your songs?
Apple makes it downright difficult to copy music from your iPod to another computer. You can’t even get back your songs that you have bought from the Apple Store at iTunes because you are not allowed to download them twice.
Don’t fret. Here is a simple way to move all your music from the iPod to another computer. Plug in your iPod to a computer and open iTunes. Click on the Summary tab. Under Options put a checkmark next to Enable Disk Use and click Apply. When you do this, your iPod will show up in Windows Explorer as a separate removable disk. However, before you can browse for files you need to change some settings in Explorer.
Select the iPod in Windows Explorer and go to Tools –>Folder Options. Hit View tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders”. Click Apply. Now you will be able to see the files in your iPod. Open the folder called iPod Control. You will see some more folders called D1, D2, etc. The MP3 and MP4 files are inside these folders. Copy all of them, and save them in your computer’s hard disk. Next, go to iTunes and import your songs back.
This is a simple way to dump all your music from your iPod to another computer. You will find that iTunes really scatters your files all over the place within the iPod. There is no way you can pick and choose songs that you want to copy. However, if you want to selectively copy music, you need a software called Music Rescue. It is available from www.kennettnet.co.uk/musicrescue. This software was previously called PodUtil. You may find a free version of it on the Internet.
Music Rescue shows your iPod just as iTunes does. Your songs and playlists are displayed too. To copy files, select them in the main window and click Copy. When prompted, choose My Music/iTu nes as the target folder and let the copy begin.
Once you connect your iPod to another PC, you will get a dialog box telling you that your iPod is synced with another PC. It will ask whether you want to Transfer Purchases or “Erase and Sync”. This last option will replace the content of your iPod with the contents of your PC’s iTunes library. Be careful to not click on this till you have re-imported the songs into iTunes. So just select Cancel or Transfer Purchases if you have bought songs from the Apple Store.
YouTube to iPod
You will often come across wonderful videos on YouTube (www.youtube.com). But all these videos are in Flash format with an FLV extension. Also, there is no download button from which you can save these videos into your hard disk. You will always have to watch it on your browser after visiting the site. And that is exactly what YouTube wants so that traffic to its site increases.
Since it is not easy to download and save these Flash videos from YouTube, you need a small application that will do it for you. Go to www.dvdvideosoft.com and download the YouTube-to-iPod converter. The program is free. Install the program and launch it.
Once the simple interface comes up, you will be asked to insert the url of the video. You can get it easily by right clicking on the video in YouTube and choosing Copy Shortcut. It will look something like this – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =WsRoQ88le7g&mode=related&search=. Next, choose the location where you would like to save your converted video file. In the list of Devices, select Apple iPod. In the list of Profiles, select one of the available pre-configured profiles. The program converts all files to 24 frames per second (fps), whereas 29.97 is the original frame rate for most videos. Since YouTube videos are already in a degraded quality, you will not find any change in the playback. Click on Convert and wait a few seconds. Once the conversion is complete, import the file into iTunes and sync it with your iPod.
YouTube to mobile
There is another way you can do this conversion. Just go to www.vixy.net. This is an online FLV converter. It can also convert movies so that you can watch them on your mobile phone. All you have to do is enter the url as you did before from YouTube and choose whether you want the conversion for your iPod or your cell phone. The site converts the video to 320-by-240 MPEG-4 video at 29.97 fps. Other conversions possible from this site includes AVI, MOV, MP4, MP3 and GP.
