The main hard drive died in the computer where I keep my music library. Fortunately, I had my music stored on a newer hard drive, so I didn’t lose any data, and besides, all of my music is on my iPod as well. Unfortunately, what I just discovered is that even though the actual tracks are on the still living hard drive, all of the metadata was back on the old main drive, meaning that I lost all of my playlists, play counts, and worst, song ratings. I had rated just about all of the two thousand songs in my library, and now I have to go back and do it all again. Misery. I guess, of all the bad things that can happen to your iPod or your data, losing your song ratings isn’t that bad, but it still means a lot of work ahead.
January 4, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Most, if not all, of that metadata should be on the iPod, if you have synced it recently. You might want to take a peek at one of the iPod “ripper” apps out there. I know that I’ve been rating songs on my iPod at work and then updating at night when I sync/recharge.
It’s really too bad that Apple is scared to include a “Recover from iPod” feature in iTunes.
January 4, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Now is a good time to break out the DVD/R+ and do a little Backup of the rest of your data, maybe? 🙂
January 4, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Yes, gtkpod and its libgpod library will read all that metadata off the iPod. The trick would be getting it back into iTunes. It might be doable with some AppleScript.
January 5, 2006 at 2:07 pm
HI:
You might be able to put one of the Live CD versions of Linux up on that machine and pull at least some of the data off onto removable storage, like a USB drive or DVD or something… Knoppix or Mephis.
I’ve heard that you can often recover windows data from a failing HD with a “forensic” version of Linux.
That assumes that the drive isn’t physically unable to spin, etc…
Good luck, JR
January 26, 2006 at 11:31 am
if anyone has anything bad to say about an ipod PLEASE email me….school project