Apple has decided — I think the official reason is “because they’re dicks” — to keep people from pulling mp3s off of their iPods onto their computers.  It’s supported by the Linux program gtkpod, but while gtkpod is rather awesome at putting stuff onto iPods, it does less-than-useful things such as “violently crashing suddenly” when trying to pull stuff off of one.

So, here’s how I do it.  It works with my OS (Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope), my iPod (120GB iPod Classic), FAT32 formatting, and … other specific-to-me stuff (?) … and I’m not really interested in supporting this.  If this doesn’t work for you and you know how to do it and want to help, feel free to post, but I can’t/won’t respond if you need more help.  Sorry.

Although I have not tried it, I am roughly 111% certain this will fail with Apple DRMmed music, which is fine because my iPod is never going near an installation of iTunes.  I don’t know if it will work with newer iTunes downloads, which I’ve read/heard are DRM-free, but I’m not going to try it.  iTunes is seriously evil software, and I’m pretty sure that the only reason NAV does not remove it as malware when doing a virus scan is that doing so would be too difficult.

First, install EasyTag.  In Ubuntu, that’s as easy as

sudo apt-get install easytag

Now, get the MP3s, which are helter-skelter peppered through useless directories, onto your computer.  Mount it as as a USB block device, which should happen automatically when you plug it in.  It will likely end up somewhere like /media/IPOD, but it’s easiest to use a graphical file browser (just go to “Places” on the Ubuntu launch bar) as it will show up, conveniently, as a clearly-marked mounted device.

The files are in iPod_Control/Music (yes, I expected that to be harder), but in a completely useless hierarchy.  Copy the files over — I’d just copy the whole Music folder over — onto somewhere local to your PC.  I use a directory called ~/MusicStage, but, you know, whatever.

The files will transfer in some amount of time.  Then open EasyTag and navigate to whatever you are calling your staging folder.  The program will go through and read the tags on all the mp3s in the directory.  You will note that, internally, all the tags on the mp3s are preserved, which is cool, because this would be an obvious way in which Apple could have been bigger dicks.

Hit Control-A to select all the files.  There’s an icon — I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be, but by default it’s immediately to the left of the broom icon — hit it.  This opens the “Tag and File Name scan” window.  Set the scanner to “Rename Files and Directories”.  You can go wild at this point, sorting your albums as you see fit, but I do a fairly basic [DIR]/Artist/Album/NN Track format, where NN is the track number.  To do that, put the following into “Rename File and Directory”, of course changing the beginning part to wherever your home folder is:

/home/joshua/Music/%a/%b/%n %t

Hit the same wtf-is-that-supposed-to-be icon on this dialog.  Then hit the familiar commit-to-disk icon (it looks like a green arrow pointing downwards at a hard drive) and then — well, that’s it.  Now your music is back on your PC.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:51:18 +0000
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