Copying songs out of an iPod Nano

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Level 1

21 points

Copying songs out of an iPod Nano

Hi there,

So I have this 6-gen Nano that takes a licking' but keeps on tickin' (I hope I haven't jinxed it), that I've been using at home. I want to copy about 15GB of songs from it into, among other places, my Music library (which currently holds some — but not all — of them).

Can't figure out how to do it. I can mount the Nano on my iMac, and get to it through Finder. I don't want to sync it, it looks like it'll sync my library to the iPod; I want to go the other way. If I open "Manage Storage…" I can see the songs, and select them, singly or as a group, but I can apparently only delete them, not copy them, at least not by any means I can find.

Enabling "disk use" doesn't make the files available. In addition, I could get into iPod_Control/iTunes from Terminal and saw (among other unfamiliar things) a Music directory with a number of subdirectories:

./iPod_Control/Music:
F00	F05	F10	F15	F20	F25	F30	F35	F40	F45
F01	F06	F11	F16	F21	F26	F31	F36	F41	F46
F02	F07	F12	F17	F22	F27	F32	F37	F42	F47
F03	F08	F13	F18	F23	F28	F33	F38	F43	F48
F04	F09	F14	F19	F24	F29	F34	F39	F44	F49

Here's a Sample:


./iPod_Control/Music/F00:
BRWV.m4a	GRBQ.mp3	KOED.m4a	QSEJ.m4a	TVLB.mp3
GBHP.m4a	GZAF.m4a	MOHE.m4a	QVTG.m4a
GCMT.m4b	KLYY.m4a	NYAI.m4a	SAHN.m4a

Those are clearly audio files. Which is which, I have no idea. Each subdirectory holds 11-15 items. I could find no invisibles in these subdirectories.

Conceivably, there's a fairly simple Unix command to copy all of those to my iMac (something like

cp -R ./iPod_Control/Music /Volumes/MyiMac/Users/MyUserName/Desktop

? I'd appreciate any help with that.)

But that won't tell me what the songs are. Now, there are several files and subdirectories I have found that look like they may hold the information; the question becomes how can I access that information? I found several ".itdb" files, containing (using cat) what looks like some usable information embedded in an extraordinary amount of non-printables (e.g.,


??*?Shine a Light (Live) [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]K?K?(?Shine a Light+M???????H
    	?	?I;9?1?0pLegends of Country Music: The Best of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys5?5?
lLegends of Country Music: The Best of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys7I????? %?5??&'"??/?q??

That's not telling me which file is which, however.

But, there's gotta be a better way. Can anybody offer one?

Thanx,

Jeff

🤔😉😊

(P.S., How would I play an audio file from Terminal?)

iPod nano

Posted on Jul 22, 2025 4:33 PM

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Answer 1

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the fiend

Level 7

23,436 points

Jul 26, 2025 2:27 AM in response to Jeff Mark

Neither iTunes nor Finder have a method for copying music from an iPod to the computer.

Have a read of this tip; Recover your iTunes library from your iPo… - Apple Community, written by fellow user turingtest2, which explains things and suggests numerous software that can copy your music. Some is free, some is limited free and some of it requires a payment.

(Had to edit this post, I forgot to put the link in. Oops!)

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Answer 2

Jeff Mark Author

Level 1

21 points

Jul 26, 2025 7:10 PM in response to the fiend

The stuff in that link was informative, but a little out of date — it seems iTunes (and Windows)-focused. And a lot of the links to apps are apparently broken. But the link in it to "Recover media from an iPod" had useful information, which confirmed stuff I've seen elsewhere.

So I got the files off the iPod. Turns out only the filenames changed, not the metadata. So I'm using Music Tag Editor to copy the song name to the filename. However...

(Boy, I seem to be the champion of weird problems.) The Nano was showing some odd behavior, the home button didn't seem to work, so I thought I'd take the opportunity, as long as I had the song files safe, to do a restore on the iPod. So I started one.

That's where I think I messed up. When the little "in process" icon that had appeared in the sidebar had stopped doing anything, I panicked, and unplugged the Nano. It appeared to restart, everything looked normal, I could change settings… But when I plugged it back in — as I would need to do to copy stuff onto it — it mounted as a drive, with a generic name. And that was all. The Finder iPod management window that I'd gotten used to was not there.

On a hunch, I opened Music. My iPod was in the sidebar. I clicked its and got a window that says "Set up Theodora" and "Open Finder to finish setting up your iPod", with a "Open Finder" button. I clicked it, a Finder "iPod management" window opened. I tied to start a restore again. It's been going on for almost an hour as I write. I also noticed that it misidentified my iPod as 7th Gen, it's not, it's 6th Gen.

I looked at a lot of the "dead nano" questions here, and I didn't see one that was quite the same. 'Course, since there were 38 pages, totaling 760 entries, I might have missed something.

Anyone have any thoughts? I wonder if the Genius Bar could help me out. If not, well, it served me well for almost 12 years… I could always get another if I really want, they're all over eBay.

Thanks,

Jeff

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