Copying between two ipods

BrayHead

Santa brought the wife an ipod for christmas and I want to copy my music collection from my ipod to her new one. What's the best way to do this? Can I connect both to the pc at once and use itunes to copy from one to the other?

Thanks

bringitdown

Best of my knowledge you can't .... you can only copy to an iPod, not from it.

There is a tool called Anapod explorer that would allow you to copy from your iPod, but it costs.... http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/

dub_skav

You can copy from an IPOD using a number of programs, 2 free and small ones are PodUtil and ephpod, a google search will pop them up for you.
Either one will do it for you.
Ephpod might be a good option as you can copy to your IPOD using it and manage playlists etc also, so it gets you away from using itunes.

elduggo

you can do it by using iTunes very 'creatively'. Essentially what you need to do is as follows;

- attach iPod to your computer
- in 'explorer' (on windows), you need to unhide the music folder
- in iTunes you need to back up your library by moving the files 'iTunes Music Library.xml' and the 'iTunes Library' data file aside.
- in iTunes click on 'file' and scroll down to 'add files to library'
- in the resultant dialog, scroll down to whatever drive the iPod was mounted to (typically E:)
- click on the Music folder, then click 'Ok'

this will add all the music on the device to your iTunes library. To add to the second iPod, merely drag and drop in iTunes as per usual.

To restore your library once you've finised copy back the files you moved aside previously.

bringitdown

Does the above preserve tagging? Does it leave the filenames as gobledy gook so to speak (i.e. as they appear in the hidden iPod directory)?

elduggo

in my experience, no, it is able to read the names and preserves them when it imports into the iTunes library. I did notice on a few occasions (very rare though) that names weren't preserved. These were on CDs that hadn't been imported using iTunes, and only applied to about 2 CDs. Everything else was grand.

Bulmers

From reading above, it is possible to connect an iPOD to the PC and just download the songs that are on itunes on that PC to a different ipod?

Maybe it was answere above but i was getting a bi confused, just got new ipod too and want to copy stuff onto sisters new ipod?

cheers

elduggo

the above describes how to copy from one iPod to another. It uses the computer's internal USB bus to route the data from one iPod to the other but doesn't copy anything to the computer's hard disk.

To transfer from one iPod to the other by first transferring all the data from the first iPod to the PC you will need to use one of the utilities mentioned in this thread (and theres another thread further down on this). The one I use is PodUtil. An excellent shareware utility and google will tell you where to find it.