iPod I found my old iPod!

[Asu]

Hello,

I found my old iPod, MC293LL and I would like to import the songs into my library on my computer (MAC, 13.1).
There are over 4000 songs on the device but the Mac OS Finder can't see them. They do show up in the Music app but when I try to do "Import" the same useless Finder window pops up, not showing any music files/folders. I downloaded 2 apps, TouchCopy and MobilTrans but neither of them were able to access the files.
Is there any way to do it?

Thanks

 

[Grumpus]

The music on your iPod is stored in a Music folder inside a hidden folder called iPod_Control. The easiest way to get at it is using the terminal. For that to work, 'disk mode' must be enabled for your iPod.

First, connect the iPod to your computer. If you're running Catalina or newer, open a Finder window and click on the iPod entry under Locations in the sidebar on the left. If there are two entries for the iPod, click on the one with the icon that looks like an iPod. Now, in the General tab look in the Options section and make sure that Enable disk use is checked. If you're running an older OS, launch iTunes and then click the (tiny) iPod icon in the topbar and make sure the Enable disk use box is checked. You should now see a disk icon corresponding to your iPod on the Desktop. If you don't see the icon, eject the iPod, unplug it and then plug it back in.

Now open a terminal by using Finder to navigate to Applications. Double-click the Utilities folder, then double-click Terminal.app to launch the terminal. In what follows you'll be using terminal commands to copy the contents of the iPod's Music folder onto your Desktop and unhiding the contents so that you can import them into either the Music or iTunes apps. In the attached screenshot, I'll show the terminal's prompt as a single dollar sign '$' but your prompt may look different, as may be color of your terminal. Double-check your typing before you hit Enter on each command.

The 'mount' name of the iPod will probably be 'iPod' but we need to make sure using the 'ls' command:

ls /Volumes

If the name is something different for you, you'll have to substitute that name for 'iPod' in what follows.

Now you'll execute several commands to copy the contents of the iPod's Music folder to your Desktop and then change the attributes of the files to make everything visible. This is required before you can import the music. iPods are slow devices communicating over slow USB connections, so the copying part (the 'cp' command) can take quite a while.

cp -r /Volumes/iPod/iPod_Control/Music ~/Desktop
chflags -R nohidden ~/Desktop/Music
xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine ~/Desktop/Music
xattr -rd com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Desktop/Music

After the 2nd 'xattr' command, you should see the Music folder appear on the Desktop. Now you can import everything. To import into Music.app, use the File -> Import... menu to navigate to the Music folder on your Desktop, then click Open. To import into iTunes.app, use File -> Add to Library... to navigate to the Music folder on your Desktop, then click Open.

If you already have music on your computer, something to be aware of is that the possibility of duplication. You can avoid that by holding down the Option key when you launch Music or iTunes and then creating a new library to hold the music from your iPod.

Hope this helps. Let us know how you get on.

 

[1rottenapple]

I’m not skilled in terminal but I bought an application on my max that let me upload the iPod music to my Mac worth the money about $30 given I lost a few files in my iTunes.

 

[arw]

@Grumpus I appreciate the detailed guide. But for me, the files on the iPods are always stripped of any metadata/filenames (and therefore probably not of much use for OP). All information is stored in the iPods database afaik.
@1rottenapple can you disclose OP the name of the application that is working for you?

 

[1rottenapple]

@Grumpus I appreciate the detailed guide. But for me, the files on the iPods are always stripped of any metadata/filenames (and therefore probably not of much use for OP). All information is stored in the iPods database afaik.
@1rottenapple can you disclose OP the name of the application that is working for you?

IMazing. Paid for it and it was worth it. Plug and play.

 

[Asu]

I Thank for the first responder for the detailed explanation . I also ended up buying imazing however, because I needed the metadata. Why there has never been a "restore" function in iTunes/Music, no one knows.

 

[Grumpus]

Files on the iPod have names that are non-useful to humans, but they are not stripped of metadata and can be successfully imported into iTunes.app or Music.app. Metadata, such as song and album names, is embedded in the .mp3/.m4a files, and is not stripped by the process. Music or iTunes will use the metadata as expected, with the possible exception of any cover art which has non-square dimensions.

I have done these imports successfully many times, on macOS and on Windows. The commands in the terminal screenshot that I posted are real, and I imported the results into Music running on Monterey with no problem. On Windows, I've always been able to read directly from the iPod without copying to a temporary folder. macOS insists on adding extended attributes that have to be stripped out via 'xattr -d' before the files can be imported into the music programs, which is why I copied to the Desktop folder in my example.

 

[Grumpus]

BTW, I should mention that I've never tried the procedure in my first post with an iPod Touch. I wouldn't expect it to work with those "phones without the phone" since iPhones can't be put into disk mode.

 

[arw]

I have the same iPod Classic 7th gen as the OP. On Big Sur I can directly access the iPod_Control/Music folder on the iPod (or any iDevice).
In my case, the media files are completely stripped of any metadata except codec info (as visible in the screenshot in post #4).
Maybe if one manages music on the iPod manually instead of syncing it then metadata is kept?
Would be interesting to know. How did you transfer the music @Grumpus?

Because I do remember it working some years ago when I still managed my iPods manually. But that was also on an older version of iTunes and macOS/OSX.

 

[Grumpus]

I have the same iPod Classic 7th gen as the OP. On Big Sur I can directly access the iPod_Control/Music folder on the iPod (or any iDevice).
In my case, the media files are completely stripped of any metadata except codec info (as visible in the screenshot in post #4).
Maybe if one manages music on the iPod manually instead of syncing it then metadata is kept?
Would be interesting to know. How did you transfer the music @Grumpus?

Because I do remember it working some years ago when I still managed my iPods manually. But that was also on an older version of iTunes and macOS/OSX.

Did you try importing into Music or iTunes? The newest iPod I have to hand is a 7th gen Nano, and it most definitely, you can take-it-to-the-bank works with that. I believe that's the newest non-Touch iPod that Apple made, and it's therefore newer than the 7th gen Classic.

If you can spare the time, would you please actually try the procedure? I'm curious to know for sure whether the 7th gen Classic is an outlier, and I think the only way to know for sure is to try it. My experience is necessarily limited to, you know, my experience, but I've done this with at least a dozen different iPods with no failures.

 

[Grumpus]

I used macports to install a command line version of mediainfo and looked at the files on my 7th gen Nano. The metadata appears to be there. So, @arw, you are right, I am wrong.

 

[Grumpus]

deleted

 

[arw]

So, @arw, you are right, I am wrong.

No, you were also right. I (probably) found the reason for our different observations. I did various testing on my 7th gen Nano. It all comes down to convert higher bitrate songs which I always tick as I don't need/hear (Hi-Res) lossless audio on-the-go. Therefore the m4a files on my Nano also don't contain any metadata. (A test file in iTunes with ≤ 256 kbps retains its metadata on the iPod)

So if one really needs 3rd party software to extract the tagged music from iPods or can simply copy it (like you described) comes down to the question if this option was originally ticked when adding files to the iDevice.

 

[ferko86]

No, you were also right. I (probably) found the reason for our different observations. I did various testing on my 7th gen Nano. It all comes down to convert higher bitrate songs which I always tick as I don't need/hear (Hi-Res) lossless audio on-the-go. Therefore the m4a files on my Nano also don't contain any metadata. (A test file in iTunes with ≤ 256 kbps retains its metadata on the iPod)

So if one really needs 3rd party software to extract the tagged music from iPods or can simply copy it (like you described) comes down to the question if this option was originally ticked when adding files to the iDevice.
View attachment 2147179

@arw This is very interesting .

 

[Grumpus]

So if one really needs 3rd party software to extract the tagged music from iPods or can simply copy it (like you described) comes down to the question if this option was originally ticked when adding files to the iDevice.

Thanks, that's interesting. I may have missed it, but I don't think we know if iMazing would transfer converted media files or not. There's a free trial and I might try it out, but that will have to wait.

I have used the hand-copy method to rescue music for several friends and friends-of-friends over the years. It's not something I invented, I'm sure that I read about it somewhere or other, decades ago.

 

[arw]

I don't think we know if iMazing would transfer converted media files or not.

Just tested iMazing. It works with converted files.
But only the most basic tags are transferred:
- Artist Album Tracknumber Genre Comment
- no artwork
But overall I'd definitely call it a success.

 

[Grumpus]

But overall I'd definitely call it a success.

Thanks, that's good information. If you're using Music.app, it's possible that iMazing isn't to blame for missing artwork. I've been testing Music.app on a cloned Monterey drive, and when I imported my iTunes music into it, roughly 3/4 of all the artwork was missing. On a lot of the files, I could right-click and select Show Info and see the artwork, but it wouldn't be displayed in the Album or Song views. It's not conclusive, but when I resized some of the artwork to have square dimensions, i.e. 500x500, it's displayed properly. I used ImageMagick's convert program to do the resizing, installed by macports.

 

[arw]

If you're using Music.app, it's possible that iMazing isn't to blame for missing artwork.

You‘re right. In regard to the files I examined, it‘s just how the convert-feature works and it‘s good that way:
In my case, all source files have (hi-res) artwork embedded. But as observed, the converted files on the iPod are stripped of any metadata/artwork. Just a smaller thumbnail is saved in the iPods artwork database.
It‘s respectful enough that iMazing is able to correctly re-tag the files with information of the iPods database.

You‘re observations with Music.app are interesting. I hope I can use iTunes via Retroactive forever.

 

[Grumpus]

You‘re observations with Music.app are interesting. I hope I can use iTunes via Retroactive forever.

I could live with Music.app. It's Podcasts.app that gives me heartburn.

Have you applied the OS patches released yesterday? If so, did your Retroactive-installed iTunes survive?

I ran iTunes installed via Retroactive for quite a while, but it always bothered me that you have to allow Full Disk Access for /bin/bash in order for iPod syncing to work. That's very close to giving everything Full Disk Access. So, I switched to using a method provided by @bogdanw [1]. Yesterday's Monterey update to 12.6.3 deleted iTunes! Not that big a deal, since I could quickly reinstall from a pkg file, but definitely a **ck move on Apple's part. If Retroactive users are losing iTunes, that's a much bigger thing, since the iTunes 12.9.5 reinstall involves a big download and quite a bit of time.

If you haven't applied yesterday's patches yet, it might be prudent to make a copy of /Applications/iTunes before doing so, just in case. It could be that the Retroactive version will survive, but better safe than sorry.

[1] My install script uses bash and I already had a tar of /Applications/iTunes from Mojave, but otherwise it's the same as that given by @bogdanw in the important particulars.

 

[arw]

Getting a little off-topic but I hope OP don't mind...

Have you applied the OS patches released yesterday? If so, did your Retroactive-installed iTunes survive?

Not yet, and won't for some time.

I ran iTunes installed via Retroactive for quite a while, but it always bothered me that you have to allow Full Disk Access for /bin/bash in order for iPod syncing to work. That's very close to giving everything Full Disk Access. So, I switched to using a method provided by @bogdanw [1].

I didn't know there was another way. I have a Mojave copy and tried the described steps (modifying Info.plist and version.plist. I can use this iTunes version but not sync/access iPods. What else is there to do? The iTunes Access thing described here?

 

[Grumpus]

I didn't know there was another way. I have a Mojave copy and tried the described steps (modifying Info.plist and version.plist. I can use this iTunes version but not sync/access iPods. What else is there to do? The iTunes Access thing described here?

What worked for me was allowing Full Disk Access for iTunes in Preferences -> Security & Privacy. If it's not already in the list, use the '+' button to add it (but as I recall, it was already in the list). I haven't needed to try iTunes Access, and I'm not sure that procedure would work on Monterey anyway.

 

[arw]

Thanks @Grumpus . After a reboot it works. Amazing that it's so easy. I thought frameworks had to be patched but apparently that only applies to Aperture...

 

[Grumpus]

I should also mention that sometimes Finder can interfere when iTunes is syncing an iPod. The problem is the AMPDevicesAgent process, which notifies Finder than an iPod has been connected. It helps a lot to uncheck 'Automatically sync when this iPod is connected' in Finder. You can also pause AMPDevicesAgent before you start iTunes, and then resume it after iTunes exits, but that's a lot of trouble:

pkill -SIGSTOP AMPDevicesAgent # pause
pkill -SIGCONT AMPDevicesAgent # resume

The most satisfactory solution for me has been to automatically kill AMPDevicesAgent when I log in via a launch agent. To do this, I first created the LaunchAgents directory, which didn't initially exist on Monterey:

mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents

and then I added the following plist as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/local.AMPDevicesAgentMustDie.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>local.AMPDevicesAgentMustDie</string>
        <key>Program</key>
        <string>/usr/bin/pkill</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>pkill</string>
            <string>-SIGTERM</string>
            <string>AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
    </dict>
</plist>

You have to log out and back on for it to take effect. To undo, simply remove the file, or move it out of the LaunchAgents directory.

 

[bogdanw]

The polite way to unload an agent now is launchctl bootout

launchctl bootout gui/501/com.apple.AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent

to restart it

launchctl kickstart -k gui/501/com.apple.AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent

iTunesAccess can’t be installed in the same way on Monterey, because the system volume is locked.

I was surprised too by the large download needed by Retroactive for installing iTunes 12.9 and the developer kindly explained that it has to be extracted from the full installer. So it downloads InstallESD.dmg about 5.54 GB https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...tunes-on-macos-catalina.2207898/post-27930528

 

[Grumpus]

The polite way to unload an agent now is launchctl bootout

I've never been accused of excessive politeness

Don't you have to disable SIP to do launchctl bootout?

Unchecking 'Automatically sync when this iPod is connected' in Finder is probably sufficient, but the nuclear option definitely works! This blog post gives a 'defaults write' command to solve the problem, and while that may work on Catalina it didn't work for me on Monterey.

During the installation of iTunes 12.9.5, Retroactive downloads InstallESDDmg.pkg to /tmp and extracts iTunes.app from it. It's roughly a 5GB download, so there's plenty of time to do

ln /tmp/InstallESDDmg.pkg ~

so that you retain a copy. If you want to rerun Retroactive you can copy ~/InstallESDDMG.pkg back to /tmp and Retroactive skips re-downloading it.