Recommendations for Ripping Files from an Old iPod

[Ted's of Beverly Hills]

I have an old iPod classic that's pretty beat up, and I've already upgraded to a Sony Walkman portable music player for on-the-go listening. However, I've got a bunch of old podcast episodes that have long since been scrubbed from the internet and don't appear to have been archived anywhere. Does anybody have any recommendations for Windows 10 compatible software/apps (preferably free or inexpensive) that will let me download the files off my device without losing the metadata? The way the old ipods indexed all of their files makes it kind of pointless to just dump the drive to my desktop; I'm looking for a way to get the specific files I want with their actual names instead of 150 gb worth of files all generically named something like "BKAF.mp3." Without some kind of sensible software solution, I'll be stuck checking the individual properties of all ~14000 files for the ones I'm looking for. Any suggestions?

 

[Cats]

what if you found an ipod one day and it turned out to be Mitchell Henderson's

 

[Eleventyish]

OP, I have no idea - I assume you want iTunes, but I'd check the stupid questions or portable music player threads on 4chan.org/g/catalog - but for the love of God sell that sucker on ebay. Do not throw it out.

You could check archive.org for an older version of iTunes, and see if that can rip the files for you. There's also stuff like Clementine.

 

[Nitro!]

OP, I'm not sure how far back your iPod is, but IIRC, my touch-wheel iPod was recognized as a mass storage USB device, and you could just drag 'n drop the mp3s. They'll have mangled filenames like you mentioned but the metadata should be intact. Picard can do a mass-rename by extracting information from the tags with a little macro work. Here's a thread I found that goes over this same scenario. https://community.metabrainz.org/t/renaming-folders-and-filenames-from-tags/244338/2

 

[Ted's of Beverly Hills]

OP, I'm not sure how far back your iPod is, but IIRC, my touch-wheel iPod was recognized as a mass storage USB device, and you could just drag 'n drop the mp3s. They'll have mangled filenames like you mentioned but the metadata should be intact. Picard can do a mass-rename by extracting information from the tags with a little macro work. Here's a thread I found that goes over this same scenario. https://community.metabrainz.org/t/renaming-folders-and-filenames-from-tags/244338/2

Solid, I'll take a look at that and see if that works. My iPod Classic dates back to around... 2012, maybe? I believe it was one of the last production runs before they retired the line altogether, so relatively new as they go.

OP, I have no idea - I assume you want iTunes, but I'd check the stupid questions or portable music player threads on 4chan.org/g/catalog - but for the love of God sell that sucker on ebay. Do not throw it out.

You could check archive.org for an older version of iTunes, and see if that can rip the files for you. There's also stuff like Clementine.

Apple deliberately made it impossible to use iTunes to move files off of the device and onto the desktop - I guess to incentivize buying music directly from them and not ripping your own from physical media. Maybe it's possible to do if you're more computer-literate than I am, but afaik it's conventionally impossible to do.

Probably nobody would be after my busted-up iPod. I've replaced the battery twice and the display once, and the second time I got the wrong model and the battery was so big I couldn't close the case properly. The screen is now dented outward (still works, at least), and the whole case is wrapped in black electrical tape. It'd probably be illegal to even put this thing through the mail given the shape the battery is likely in.

what if you found an ipod one day and it turned out to be Mitchell Henderson's

I'm always keeping an eye out for that golden iPod.

 

[Rembrandt]

https://community.metabrainz.org/t/renaming-folders-and-filenames-from-tags/244338/2

Archiving it just in case, these kinds of forums tend to disappear sooner or later.

 

[Poppavalyim Andropoff]

Solid, I'll take a look at that and see if that works. My iPod Classic dates back to around... 2012, maybe? I believe it was one of the last production runs before they retired the line altogether, so relatively new as they go.

This thread made me find mine & it still works since 2007 not too bad. Looks like they ended in 2014
I used to have to do this recovery thing a few times and used a program called Disk Drill?