Moving Files Off an iPod

At 8:02 AM an incident occured here at the apartment. Neighborhood #2 (Laika) from the Arcade Fire album “Funeral” was discovered much to my distress to contain a sound glitch. Having heard that album quite a lot I knew this stemmed from some very recent file corruption or possibly that iTunes had raped the file. The latter I believe to be more likely.

Luckily I have an iPod lying about with the album on so I thought I’d just hook it up, browse to the file and recover it and I could go back to the days chores. That’s actually exactly what happened but instead of taking less than a minute I had to spend around 30 minutes on the operation.

Apple, in all their coorporate wisdom, have made it not only near impossible to retrieve the files from an iPod by hiding the folder your music is stored in, but have also renamed all the files into random 4 letter words like “WZBX.mp3”. Why? Because they can.

So I found this guide which is very helpful if you discover errors in your music collection, accidently delete some files or just want to move some of YOUR files from the iPod to another storage.

Since filenames were rendered useless I noted the size of the file and did a search in the terminal on the exact size on the iPod:

find . -size 6092603c

Will search for files below current path with the exact size of 6092603 bytes.

My next MP3 player will probably be of the iRiver kind. I find my three year old iRiver iHP-120 to be a better experience than this shiny new 80 GB iPod. Albums are quickly and easily navigated to and it just gets out of your way. Luckily we’re going to use the iPod with our iPod Hi-Fi so its shortcomings will be no huge problem.

So up yours, Apple.