Here's the situation I'm currently in. The hard drive in one of my empegs was dying, so I put that one aside and have been using the 10g one I have instead (until I get around to putting the new drive in the other one). The songs are still on it, it will just be iffy being able to get to them. I had them all on my computer hard drive. That hard drive died about a month ago. I have all those songs on my iPod Touch.

I never made an optical backup of the songs because they were always on at least two hard drives at the same time (with a subset on the smaller empeg).

iTunes let me recover the songs I purchased from iTunes, but I can't see how to get the rest of the songs off the iPod. Is that even possible, or is it disabled on purpose (kind of like the original emplode)? Should I just skip that and go right to trying to get them off the empeg and recover as much as possible before reripping the ones that I can't recover?

Thanks for any advice, I'm still new at this iPod thing

It used to be that there was a hidden directory on the iPods that contained all the music files. I don't know if that's still the case, but it's worth looking.

The iPod Touch, and the iPhone do not present themselves as a mass storage device, so direct disk access methods won't work.

If you've jailbroken it then you can install SSH and/or a FTP server and access the files.

Mass storage hack for iPod touch

Utilities to restore music from an ipod touch or iPhone (this is a Google results page, all the top matches link to working solutions)

I do not have a Touch but I have had times when I needed to recover music from my Ipod Classic. I am assuming this method will also work for your Touch.

1.) Ipod must be set up as portable hard drive in Itunes(I might be wrong but I do not have mine with me right now to test so I will leave that as step one. You can try it with out changing the settings in I Tunes.)

2.) Plug Ipod into PC.

3.) Using Windows Explorer navigate to the Removable drive letter that corresponds to your Ipod.

4.) Use the search function for (.mp3) in that drive letter.

5.) You should see a bunch of files named with four characters like this....GHBR.mp3 or something. (These are all of your MP3 files renamed on the Ipod.)

6.) Highlight all the search results and copy them to the new location of your choice.

7.) Use MP3 Tag Studio or some other tagging software to rename the files using the Tag data. (It does not take long even on 10,000 files like I have).

8.) Rest easy knowing that now you have your files safely backed up again.

Cheers.

The Touch doesn't show up as a drive device in iTunes, otherwise that would be awesome. I'll have to look at the other suggestions.

Thanks folks, nobody knows everybody but collectively you sure do seem like it.

You have to use the hack I mentioned above to access a Touch or iPhone as a drive letter (mass storage device). The link I posted is Mac-only, but the majority of other tools in the second link are for Windows.

Good to know...I don't have a Touch...yet. Need larger storage capacity to make it viable option for me.

Well, AFAICT those utilities are enough to solve Tim's problem, but they aren't quite the same as full drive-letter/mass-storage support. They're more like the (rather squalid) Rio Taxi from back in the day, in that you can manually copy files on and off, but not do anything else e.g. run applications, load or save files directly to/from applications, use non-Iphone-aware Ipod utilities, etc.

Peter

I believe only the first list allows proper access as a disk.

Here's another link for making the Touch show up as a disk in Windows:

Requires Jailbroken Touch

Do all of these methods require a jailbreak for the Touch/Phone before you can download your songs?

I'm wondering this, because... doesn't the act of jailbreaking erase the entire device? Or am I remembering that wrong? When the 2.0 and app store stuff came out, I went legit on my Touch and Phone and haven't needed to jailbreak them yet. So it's been a while and I don't remember.

I'm probably sounding a bit ungrateful here; if so, you can attribute that to the effort we all put in making things like Carbon and Vibez appear as genuine mass-storage under Windows and Mac. But the software at that link does not make Touch/Iphone appear as a drive letter, let alone expose it as mass-storage: it lets you use WinFTP or WinSCP as your Rio Taxi equivalent, but still doesn't let you run applications, or load and save files directly, or use non-Iphone-aware applications.

There are, AFAIK, only two ways to have a drive-letter under Windows: be (what Linux calls) a "block device" offering raw sector access (this is what USB mass-storage comprises), or be a Samba server in Network Neighbourhood. The former is impossible on the Iphone/Touch (as the built-in firmware won't relinquish control of the filesystem), the latter should be possible (Googles it)... here's one, but it's a bit inconvenient. Looks like someone needs to write a nice Iphone GUI for it.

Peter

Oops, my mistake. Serves me right for not reading the page in detail. All the links would best be described then as "storage hacks" because as Peter mentioned, you need to use additional software to perform the transfers, the iPod won't just show up as a removable volume like a USB key or portable HD.

I suppose a third way might be to create a kind of Rosetta Stone layer in the product, that emulates a block device with FAT filesystem on the outside, but cleverly translates this to some other filesystem/database on the inside of the device.

I've had ideas for this kind of thing for years now (with the empeg in mind), but just never seem to have time to work on it or patent it (ha!).

Cheers

People in Sigmatel have occasionally suggested something like this (usually in the context of running something like UBI on bare NAND and pretending to USB that it's FAT), but, while theoretically possible, it's insanely hard (think about write caches on the PC end; you'd never know what order your clusters would arrive in) -- certainly, in the case of both Empeg and Iphone, harder than porting Samba, and probably harder even than writing a "good-enough" SMB server from scratch.

Peter

It does look like a tough problem, but not that hard to solve. FAT is very simple in how it works, so translating it to something else on the fly really oughtn't be a horrendous issue.

Tricky, yes.

EDIT: Sometimes I (wrongly) wish I weren't already so busy here, as this would be a perfect sort of thing to work on otherwise. Kinda like how Hijack was, back during the 2001-2002 tech crash.

This is probably not relevant to the iPhone, but you can also register a custom network filesystem redirector, which doesn't actually have to have anything to do with the network.

I've not tried anything like that yet, though.