Copying music off an iPod

My external hard drive broke taking with it my iTunes library. All my music is also on my 80GB iPod but iTunes annoyingly does not let you copy music from your iPod back to your computer. I guess it was one of the conditions Apple negotiated with the record companies when setting up the iTunes store.

When my iPod is connected to my Mac Mini it shows in the Finder as an external hard drive but the music folder is hidden. From the command line

john@mini:~$ ll /Volumes/John\ Patterson’s\ iPod/
total 64
drwxr-xr-x   4 john  staff   136B 30 May 19:55 Backup
drwxr-xr-x   2 john  staff    68B  1 Jan  2000 Calendars
drwxr-xr-x   2 john  staff    68B  1 Jan  2000 Contacts
-rw-r--r--@  1 john  staff   1.0K 16 Dec  2007 Desktop DB
-rw-r--r--@  1 john  staff     2B 16 Dec  2007 Desktop DF
drwxr-xr-x   3 john  staff   102B  1 Jan  2000 Notes
drwxr-xr-x   6 john  staff   204B 18 May  2008 Photos
drwxr-xr-x   2 john  staff    68B  1 Jan  2000 Recordings
drwxr-xr-x@ 11 john  staff   374B 16 Dec  2007 iPod_Control

Now we can see the iPod_Control directory that contains all the music
Simply copy the music onto your local disc:

john@mini:~$ cp -r /Volumes/John\ Patterson’s\ iPod/iPod_Control/Music/ /Volumes/External/Music/iPod

The folders are still hidden so you need to remove the hidden attribute like this

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Volumes/External/Music/iPod/F*

And when that is done drag the whole folder onto your iTunes icon and all the music files will be imported into your current library. If you have iTunes set up to keep your music folders organised it will rename the cryptically named music files and create correctly named folders for you. Neat.