Hello, first post, old question no doubt

[Cheamadonis46]

Well here is a utility that will defo help me out.
My brother sadly died earlier this year, and in the aftermath of it all I have his old ipod.
Im a windows user, because I cant afford to buy Apple, and im a masochist by nature anyway! 

I have had a brief read of the manual for the ipod, and a glance at the forum to try and answer my question, which is,

If i install Rockbox onto my bros old ipod, will it delete all the music he has on there?

I dont have a copy of his music. Although some of the music on his ipod isnt to my taste, i really want to be able to preserve it, and disseminate it out to my sister and friends etc. His taste in music was pretty esoteric to say the least, with some tracks, albums etc simply unavailable though regular channels.

Many thanks Rockbox knowledge base

[philden]

Installing Rockbox doesn't inherently affect music loaded via iTunes. However, you can only install Rockbox on a Windows formatted iPod. So if your iPod is Mac formatted, you would have to reinitialize the iPod and wipe everything. You can find out which format you have by scrolling through the information screens.

There are tools to recover music from iPods, but I don't know if you can do this from a Mac iPod on a Windows computer.

[Cheamadonis46]

Its a pc formatted ipod. My bro also didnt use the apple business.
So if i put rockbox on the current loaded music will survive. Which is what i wanted to know. Thanks

[gevaerts]

If at all possible, I would recommend backing up first. Not just for risks involving installation, the disks in these devices don't last forever and can break without notice.

[Frankenpod]

I don't think you even need a special tool to recover music from an ipod.  As long as the music files have the tags filled in.  Just look at the contents in disk mode, and have it show you the title/artist/etc fields, then copy the files to the computer accordingly.

Anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all the original firmware does is rename all the files to shorter  obfuscated file names and folders, if the tags are still there you can rescue the contents and then do a wildcard search and sort to reorganise and rename everything accordingly.  If the tags were never filled in it's all a bit more of a problem (possibly you could work out how they should go together by looking at the timestamps on them, maybe?  Otherwise you'd have to resort to listening to them!).

Either way, agree its a good idea to retrieve all the contents off of it before installing rockbox.