A user came to me after his computer was wipoed and his music mp3 were npt abcked up. He had them all on his ipod. So I told him to use itunes to copy them back which shoudl normally work I would think. After looking around and checking with him apple makes it so you can't do that? Why is this? He ownes all the music? Is there any free way to copy the data back or am I missing something? I see a lot of paid programs for this.

EphPod: http://www.ephpod.com/

Have fun

To answer your questions:

You can't copy it back because it thinks it's on a different computer and you're not supposed to be giving your "legal" music to other people... since they didn't pay for it.

That pretty much sums it up there. When I had my 4th Gen ipod (20gb) I had the same issues. I just used EphPod with it and it recovered all my music for me no problem. Just make sure you're careful with that program, you can delete your songs by accident if you're not.

Hope it helps.

a program called xplay allows you to copy and paste music from your ipod; and it will retain original file names/id3 tags

i like PodUtil, it installs on the ipod itself so you co do this instantly on any computer, PC or Mac

Great. Ty everyone. I might need to sue those. Now why does apple make it so hard to do that?

I use Sharepod. It is a small app that you run from the actual iPOd and you select and transfer. That's one of the best ones I've used since it doesn't require you computer to have the program.

no recovery software needed. use itunes to enable disk usage on the ipod, nable viewing of hidden files and folders in explorer, do a search for *.mp3 and *.m4a files on the ipod drive, copy all found files into one bigass directory, then use a tag editor program to reconstruct the filenames and directory structure from the ID3 tags.

much better.