Copy One iPod to Another

could you folks help? My son's computer died before he could back up his ipod to a new mac. Can he use his full ipod to sync with his new mac? Do we just plug and go or is there something else we need?

Hey CK ! Glad to -finally- see/read someone who does just like me ! ;) I have so often been considered as some kind of freak because I didn't have any mp3 on my Powerbook -55Go- and all of them on the iPod -40Go-, and I didn't do any sync between the two, I'm happy to see I'm not alone to have some common sense ! :) I really don't understand all those people who have the same mp3, both on their laptop AND their iPod. Come on people : you bought the iPod - not cheap- expressly for that purpose ! Why would you want to have them doubled and take twice the place ? I can understand when you have 1 few mp3s 2 a little iPod (mini or shuffle) 3 and A LOT of place on your desktop, but not in other cases, like CK and me ;) BTW I also have a backup of the iPod (in case it's stolen or broken) and I've been using IpodRip to "clone" it (I shoud say "backup" it) But lately I had problems with this app (it didn't launch anymore) so I switched to iPodAccess that works fine too. But the two apps give great results in backuping your iPod to an external drive. Hope this helps :)

why don't you just leave your music on an external HDD and tell iTunes to access it, then you wouldn't need to plug in your iPod every time. Although it wouldn't work if you were on the road and the HDD was left at home, then you would need to do what you did with the iPod. Well, I didn't think it is the best way to work that around. First, the playcount feature wouldn't work as well as it would with iTunes, second, pluggin in the iPod every time you want to hear your music would wear off the battery a lot faster, unless you buy a new one every year.

To Mark: I too have all of my music stored on a server, and I have a script that automatically mounts the share point. The other advantage of this system is that multiple users (on multiple machines) can share all of the music, without having to double up on storage space. There are some issues if you go down this road: mainly if you get iTunes to keep music arranged. (This is a good idea for other reasons, though, like if you also listen to the music via something that won't run iTunes, like an Xbox.) I have documented a heap of stuff (issues, how I got around things) on my website. http://schinckel.net

Hey, all you other people: The reason he does not just sync his songs automatically to his iPod, it that his 80 gb HDD is not big enough to hold all of his music, along with his other files. For this reason he keeps it all on his iPod, and makes iTunes feed off of it for the music. It makes perfect sense to me. Now, with that said, I will not be doing this. Why not? Well, my iPod's HDD is on the verge of dying. I can play music with it, but the second I plug it into my 'book, it goes crazy. I have not been able to sync my iPod in months. It may be time to buy a new one... I think I may wait to see what the iPhone looks like first, though.

Or you might be able to use TinkerTool, turn on hidden files, restart the finder, and drag the single iTunes control folder from your iPod into iTunes. I haven't tried this, but it should work the same way as CK's plan. The Applescript is more fun, but the repeated dragging sounds like a pain.

That's not a good idea if you like the playcount feature i thin it wont keep track of the numeber of times a track is played if you fdont have it sync automatically.

I have another solution... i changed iTunes to have my music folder on a local network share (on my very own linux server :). Actually, it is a result of moving my library over from my Wintel box... i put it on the server to move it and thought... "Why not leave it here and save room on my teenie mac mini hard drive." So, to make a long story short... i have iTunes manager my music folder for me on the netowrk share. I have my authenitaction in my keychain so that any time i'm not connected and start iTunes, it automagically logs into the share and STREAMS my music from the network. All in all, i haven't really found a bad thing about doing it this way, other than the very first iPod sync was pretty slow because it was copying all the music over the entwork... Otherwise when i add 1 or 2 albums at a time it doesn't take hardly any longer than storing the music on my local disc.

Ahh, I missed the "and elsewhere" part...Even still, why all this trouble? Plug your hard drive in, put the stuff into iTunes, attach new ipod...sync, remove hard drive.

In Tiger you can force Spotlight to index your iPod (a good thing anyway), and then use a search in a Finder window to select all your music and drag it into iTunes. Saves a good bit of mouse manipulation.