xPodClone
xPodClone
Very recently I wrote about options for backing up or moving songs from an iPod to a computer. By design, Apple doesn't enable this feature in iTunes and generally attempts to overwrite the files when you connect to a new Mac or Windows installation of iTunes with a fully loaded iPod. The best solutions for making file transfers from your iPod to another computer aren't free, but they are reasonably cheap at under $15. xPodClone is a free app that copies the entire contents of your iPod to any folder on any hard drive of either a Mac or Windows machine. That sounds fabulous on the surface, but there are a few gotchas. When iTunes transfers songs to an iPod it renames them and sorts them into a goofy array of folders which looks nothing like the traditional by artist by album organization. xPodClone preserves the iPod directory structure, complete with bizarre names and folders. All tag information is still intact, so identifying songs is no problem, but you still need to reorganize your music collection if you restore from this backup. It also copies data from CDs, DVDs and flash media. I'm sticking with the more complete solutions for the time being, but xPodClone certainly gets the job done if price is a concern. [Windows 9x/2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]