Making the sun shine out of my iPod’s riaa

This is an entirely low-tech way to download audio files from your iPod into iTunes within MacOS X 10.4. If you’re asking why this is a Good Thing, don’t read on ;-) If you’re wondering why you can’t do this apparently simple task with a built-in utility, ask Apple.

Here’s what I did:

1. Wanted to download the files, but couldn’t see how.
2. Got a copy of iLinkPod, and installed it.
3. Made a nice fresh user account with an empty iTunes.
4. Switched into that account.
   
5. Ran iLinkPod, and linked up my iPod.
6. Did this in Terminal:

# cd /Volumes/my-ipods-name-here/iLinkPodFolder/
# for folder in `ls`; do (for file in  `ls $folder/`; do `open /Volumes/my-ipods-name-here/iPod_Control/Music/$folder/$file`; done; ); done

Notes:

1. This script works by opening each file it finds. ‘open’ is a MacOS X specific shell command that uses Mac metadata to figure out what to do with the file (ie, which program should be used to do the opening).
2. If you have files that are copy-protected (eg stuff from AOL) you have to re-enter your credentials - you’ll be prompted by iTunes and the importing procedure will pause.
3. Any video content will be opened as you go along; if you don’t want this to happen you must edit the script to make it more choosy about the files it imports.
4. There are, I suspect, countless places where you can find better scripts than this one. So go and Google: I stopped looking when I thought I had something good enough for me ;-)