Moving music from an i-pod onto laptop

[Jeezaloo]

I had to rebuild my laptop and restore factory settings, and so have lost everything from i-tunes (thought I'd backed up everything, but turns out I'd only backed up photos ).

My i-pod is still fully loaded with music. Is there any way I can get these songs back onto my laptop? When I connect my i-pod it wants to wipe it clean and start again.

Any ideas?

This looks to be surprisingly difficult. From a quick Google it looks as if most people use third party software to get it done.

Here is an article on how to do it just from within iTunes but it does involve a bit of jiggery pokery with hidden files on your laptop, have a read and see what you think.

I assume that just downloading everything from the Cloud again is not an option, i.e. you had stuff in iTunes that wasn't bought in the store, such as your own MP3s and so on?

Thanks Tribpot. I was hoping someone would say, 'oh that's easy, just click X' or something.

You're right, most of my music was from CDs, with just a few from downloaded from i-tunes and amazon. Downloading again not an option!

I'll have a go with this guidance tonight and see if I can figure it out.

Yes, I just figured that you could choose either the laptop or the iPod as the master source for iTunes, with one overwriting the other

The article says in effect that you can, but not by just choosing 'iPod' and not 'laptop' as you might expect.

It all sounds a bit technical to me, but I'll give it a go and see what happens!

Fingers crossed!

Well, just take your time - the last thing you want is to lose your iTunes library so don't do anything until you're ready!

One of the many reasons I steer well clear of anything by Apple. Syncing seems to be great until it goes wrong and then it becomes virtually impossible to restore without technical 3rd party software (and I wouldn't go telling Apple you used 3rd party stuff!)