Friday, April 04, 2008

iPod Blues



If anyone knows the answer to my dilemma, your help would be greatly appreciated. Here's the situation:

I opened iTunes yesterday and saw that I had a blank iTunes library. Cindy and I both have iPods and separate iTunes accounts. (We use different desktops.) All of her stuff is still intact. Everything I had on my iPod is still there, but there's no evidence that I ever had an iTunes library on the computer. I did a general file search and only Cindy's stuff came up. But when I looked in the "My Music" in my hard drive, I found some of the stuff on my iPod, but not all of it.

I also checked my back-up drive. I thought it would be on there, but it wasn't. (Could be I'm not backing up correctly.)

Yet my iTunes account still shows my correct balance....

I hope there's a way to retrieve my library. I had several podcasts (which can be replaced easily since they're free), TV shows (which I probably wouldn't buy again) and audiobooks stored (which only represent time loading them, not money spent), including the unabridged Anna Karenina (all 30 discs). It's not a huge issue (just an inconvenience), but any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Two thoughts:

There are programs out there that can rip music off of iPods. Being a Mac guy, I can't reccomend one on Windows, but I just searched "Windows ipod extract" and got a bunch of results. I'm sure there are free versions out there if you search hard enough.

Also, it's a badly kept secret that the iTunes tech support people have a button they can push that will allow you to redownload everything in your account. As a last resort, most people have good luck going to apple, hat in hand, and explaining the situation.

Peter

Andy Wolverton said...

Appreciate the info, Peter. I'll certainly investigate those options before completely abandoning ship. Thanks again!

Unknown said...

Good luck. the iPod is a fickle beast. Mine recently decided to up and die on me. No knocks, no drops, no trying to hack the software, just simply trying to fast forward songs made the whole thing crash and not want to come back to life. Ever.