Comment Re:iPod... (Score 1) 344
You can get the files back onto the desktop and into a sensible naming structure quite easily using itunes. Just copy the ipod's music folder (which can be accessed if you show hidden and system files and mount the ipod as a disk drive) to the desktop, and import it into itunes, with the itunes option to reorder the library to its own format enabled.
Fair enough, but two things to point out about that solution:
- Given the way it is described in the article you linked, it should work outside of iTunes. You should be able to follow the steps but at the last, drag the folder into MMJB, WMP, XMMS, etc.--any software that understands the internal tags of the files themselves. (Yeah, the ITMS files are only coming back if you use iTunes).
- It will restore things to having a 'sensible naming structure' when you view the files in iTunes, but it won't correct the filenames themselves. You're still stuck with a file named OTKO.mp3 instead of something meaningful like "James McMurtry--Iolanthe.mp3."
The reason both of these things is true is that, in importing your "Music" folder back into iTunes, all iTunes did was dig into the media files and drag out the original internal tags (ID3 or equivalent) and arrange them by those attributes (Artist, Genre, Title, Album, etc.). Moderately useful, but if you want to actually, say, go into your music library and drag the files onto an mp3 CD compilation you're making for your car, you can't do it outside of iTunes anymore. And more to the point, you can't really manage those files very easily without iTunes (or some other library manager) because of the obfuscated file names. The ID3 tags is all you can manage them by, whereas once you could have done it by file name.
All of this is irrelevant if you're the kind of joe who wants iTunes to manage everything for you. But this is
