say it isn't so...ipod and itunes help.

[lynmar]

i've just moved, and my mom had to get us a new computer.
all was alright (minus the fact this computer is...unbelievably slow) until i realized that, oh, i had 600 songs on my old computer's itunes.

on my ipod i have exactly 400 songs, and i don't excactly want to go and download every one of those songs during the final days of my summer vacation.

does anyone know if there is a possible way to transfer songs from your ipod to itunes?

[oogabooga]

Yes! But it's not easy.

I had to do this back in May when I got a new hard drive. You can't do it from iTunes itself; you have to go and download a third-party program, and it can get messy. I somehow lost about 30 tracks, but it was better than having to do all 2000. It might have gone better if I'd told it to use a different filename system, because a lot of them ended up too long for Windows to handle or something.

The program I used is called SharePod, but there are several options - just google "ipod transfer" or some such phrase.

Also, any music that you bought through the iTunes store, you can transfer back. But for the rest, you have to go elsewhere.

[Figment]

If you have a pc, google idump or podutil -- both freeware or shareware programs that take songs from your ipod to your computer. If you have a mac you'll have to use another method; I'm not sure how it works with them. If, like ooga, you were transferring all of your songs to your computer, you'd just look at it in windows explorer or something, set it to show even hidden files, and copy the files themselves to your harddrive by dropping and dragging. The problem with that is that the songs are organized randomly and have nonsense names. So for just a select amount of songs, you're best off getting a program.

I use idump, myself.

[Garrett]

I know this sounds rather simple, but you could always try getting a memory stick and just putting all the music on that, or the stuff you wanted to transfer over. It could work, and memory sticks aren't too expensive.

[Figment]

Garret, I find that memory sticks are generally waaay too small. I had to buy an external hard drive to back up all of my ipod music (just in time for the realization into its prolonged decline towards death). Of course I also had several thousand fonts and a hundred word documents and photographs to back up as well, but still. Music takes up a LOT of space, and I think memory sticks only come with small amounts of storage.

[Sayle]

I use senuti to transfer songs from my iPod to my laptop. It works like a charm, and you can pick exactly which songs you want to copy.

Edit: Oh right, but I'm a mac user. So, yep... senuti's good if you have a mac, and I'm sure the aforementioned programs will work fine if you have a pc.