Tips for the Terminal-Phobic: Getting Tunes Off Your iPod

I don’t know about you, but I’ll almost always take a comfortable, aqualicious GUI over the cold white-on-black action of the Terminal.

C.K’s earlier public service post on How to Get Tunes Off of Your iPod is a fine tutorial. But it probably left many of you scratching your heads. Some of you might have even felt a little sick while reading it.

Take a deep breath and relax. There are other ways to free your music from the confines of your iPod without you ever having to look at the Terminal. All you need to do is make the iPod’s invisible music folders visible!

 Playlist posted a helpful how-to a few months ago that doesn’t even mention the terminal. For example, you can use TinkerTool to show invisible files so that when your iPod is mounted on the desktop you can copy the Music folder to your Mac, or you can use any one of the many freeware and shareware utilities designed to make the task quick and painless.

There are many iPod-to-Mac-Helper utilities out there and I’d urge you to try a few of them out before deciding which one to stick with. A quick search for the word “iPod” at VersionTracker and/or MacUpdate will give you plenty to choose from. And speciality sites like iPodLounge will have even more. I personally have been using  Drew Findley’s iPod Access, which costs $12 but saves me so much time and does the job so well, that it’s worth every penny. If you have a favorite utility, post a comment and tell us about it!

By the way - stealing music sucks, so don’t do it.