How to rip music from your iPod onto your computer with WinAmp
Posted April 14th, 2009. Categorized under Computers. 23 Comments
If you buy a new computer or experience some serious hard drive issues, you may need to transfer your music from your iPod to your computer. However, iTunes only allows you to transfers songs you’ve purchased from the iTunes store, making it pretty tough to restore your music library.
However, there’s a surprisingly quick and easy solution: WinAmp.
If you didn’t know, WinAmp is actually capable of managing your iPod (and other MP3 players), though it may not have quite the functionality you enjoy with iTunes.
Whether or not you use WinAmp as your media player of choice, it’s still a great tool to use to rip music from your iPod.
Ripping your music
- Download WinAmp here and install it.
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Choose your iPod from the sources on the left.
Open WinAmp and plug in your iPod. Somewhere on the left (depending on which theme you use), you should see a list of sources, such as “Audio”, “Video”, etc. Eventually, you should see your iPod’s name under the list of “Portables” . Select your iPod’s name.
- When you select your iPod, the main window will be divided into two: the top half will contain your artists and albums, and the bottom half will contain songs. Make sure you select “All Artists” and “All Albums”.
- Select one of the songs in the bottom half of the screen, and then hit CTRL + A to select all of the music.
- Once you’ve selected all of the songs, right-click and choose “Copy to Local Media”. WinAmp will begin transferring your music! Be patient until WinAmp finishes ripping all of the songs.
Right-click and select Copy to Local Media
- By default, WinAmp will transfer the music to your Music/My Music folder. If you want to rip to a different location, go to your Options menu and choose Preferences. Choose “CD Ripping”, the submenu for “Media Library” on the left, and choose the “Output File Settings” tab up top. Change the destination folder for default tracks, and then hit Close.
Adding the music to iTunes
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Choose Add Folder to Library
Once the music is done ripping, go ahead and eject your iPod and open iTunes, if you haven’t already.
- From the File menu, choose “Add Folder to Library”. Select your Music/My Music folder, or whichever folder you told WinAmp to rip to.
- iTunes will process your music and add it to the library! Congratulations, you did it!
There are many programs out there that are designed solely to rip music from your iPod to your computer, but WinAmp is the one that I’ve found works without too much trouble at all. If you want more features, I recommend hunting around a bit more online.
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1. Anonymous Prime
April 14th, 2009 11:07 am
For all you Linux Heads out there, check out
http://www.yamipod.com/main/modules/home/
This little app allows you to rip to and from you iPod.
Deb users: sudo apt-get install yamipod
As with any non-apple software, use at your own risk.
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