When my hard drive failed last week I didn’t bother backing up my music and audio books as I knew I had them on my iPod already. Getting everything back on the fresh clean drive has been time consuming though, and retrieving my music was a slow process.
I started with iPod Access (US$12.99) from Findley Designs.
iPod Access utilizes the iPod’s internal database to display song information. By using the database song listings can be displayed instantly, playlist data can be viewed, and songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store can be displayed properly. Most other applications must fetch song data from each song individually, making them extremely slow and incompatible with file formats other than regular MP3s.
That was very efficient in bringing all the files back onto my Mac, and not too incredibly slow, though it did take a while. While the music was back though iTunes didn’t have any of my playlists or anything, although they were still present on my iPod. Having used for many years Doug’s Applescripts for Tex-Edit Plus site, both as a source of learning and a source of scripts, I turned to his Applescripts for iTunes site.
Two scripts helped sort out iTunes:
- Synch iPod-iTunes Data
- Mirror iPod Playlists in iTunes
though they took a very long time to work through the 1020 items I have in iTunes. I also found that somewhere along the line my half dozen Audible Books had been transferred to my Mac but not actually brought into iTunes.
I think that now everything is finally more or less as I like it, and very soon the content of my iTunes folder will be backed up to the new external drive, along with everything else.
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