Backup music

[Mr Green]

Hi,

After messing up itunes playlist on my ipod I installed Rockbox and it found all my music 

I wish to backup my music to pc is there a way to do this when using rockbox most players in Linux do not see the music on the ipod [as they are looking for itunes I guess]

Do any Linux media players supprt rockbox format as it were?

Thanks

MrG

[ipod 5th Gen Video Rockbox user]

[Chronon]

A Rockboxed player is just a UMS device.  This should work fine with a number of players.  I used to use Amarok 1.x quite happily, though it's not available by default anymore. 

One option would be to just copy the whole /iPod_Control/Music/ directory to your PC then use a tagging program to organize them in directories according to their tags.

[bluebrother]

Rockbox does not have any special format. You simply put the files on the player, which appears as removable disk drive. Therefore you can the same way as you put the music on your player also copy it back using any management software you like or no management software at all and just Windows Explorer / Konqueror / Nautilus / shell.

I find your question somewhat confusing, but from what I understand I assume that you problem is that you don't "see" the music. Itunes puts the music files below the iPod_Control folder in the root of your Ipod but scrambles the filenames. This folder is also marked as hidden. You can copy the files back from that location any way you like -- you just need to live with the scrambled filenames (or mass rename them afterwards). Rockbox does not require any special disk layout, file names or similar, so there is no need for Itunes and scrambles filenames when putting the music on the player.

[Mr Green]

ok, my ipod had loads of music on it and I removed the cable before ejecting it correctly and itunes could no longer find my music

Did not want to restore as I knew I would lose the lot

After installing Rockbox the database updated and found the tracks on the pod, so no problem there

Wish to back up the tracks if possible [looks as if its a simple task]

Tried Floola Yamipod Banshee if I could see the files as rockbox does then would be an easy task to backup tracks

Tried using Rsync on Music folder but got loads of errors [file ones]

Thanks for the help

MrG

[bluebrother]

Well, I've already told you how you can copy the files back. If you get errors you should run chkdsk /f (windows) or fsck.vfat (linux) on the drive.

[Mr Green]

Thank you very much for your help....

Backed up to my desktop [scrambled names]

So have got tunes safe at the very least, now need to find an app that will restore track tags

MrG

[evilnick]

The other potential problem is that iTunes doesn't always store the metadata (artist name, album, etc.) in the tags of each file, but can store it only in the iPod database.

If the files do have tags then there are a million and one tagging utilities that can recreate a saner folder structure, and if they don't have tags then you might want to try looking into Music Brainz: http://musicbrainz.org/ as that can analyse the music and populate the files with the correct tags (make sure you're paying attention to this though).

[yapper]

I use mp3tag, but there are many options as evilnick said. There is a list of some options for tagging utilities here: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/UsefulTools#MP3_Tagging_Organization

[Horscht]

If I recall correctly there are a bunch of free Ipod managers out there that allow copying tracks back from your ipod using the ipod database. Unfortunatelly they only seem to work if you put on files using itunes, I tried copying music over from winamp and both programs complained about the database being created by a third party app and claimed they were unable to read it.

You can still give it a shot, one is called floola the other yamipod

[Mr Green]

Been looking for apps in Linux and Windows.. Yamipod and Floola gave up under Linux. Think Database in itunes is toast.

Do have backup of tracks as I said and will work through the list of apps, wondering if after I restore ipod put tracks back on would have have more luck in getting Gtkpod to reconstruct my database.

Did fsck,vfat drive just to make sure its ok....

MrG