Transferring files from an Ipod

[mjn6172]

Hi, I just had a quick question for people who are better at tech problems than I am. I was trying to make a mix CD last night, and I had the brilliant idea to pull the mp3's off of my Ipod instead switching a dozen CD's in and out of my computer. Unfortunately, it didn't work, I couldn't transfer any of the mp3's off of my Ipod and onto my hard drive. I eventually gave up and just used my CD's, but for future reference is there any way to pull songs back off of my Ipod? I'm using Itunes for Windows version 7 if that helps.

If I can't do it on Itunes, is there any (legal) 3rd party program I can use for this in the future? Preferably something that won't make me reformat my Ipod and spend a weekend putting all of my music back on it I ask because the longer I think about it, the more certain I get that it's not allowed to prevent people from transferring music illegally.

[General Zod]

How old is your iPod? A friend of mine had an iPod shuffle he wanted to get some songs off of a few months ago, and we simply pulled them straight from the iPod when it showed up as an external hdd in Windows. The songs needed renaming, and you can't have iTunes installed if you want to pull them off, but otherwise you should be able to do that unless you've got some funky drm on them or something.

[mjn6172]

I bought it on eBay ~1-2 months ago, although it was used. It's a 4th generation 20 GB picture Ipod, and according to the description was about a year old when I bought it. I didn't try looking through it as an external hard drive, I'll give that a try when I get home.

[Bounty]

iTunes stores the songs as MP3's but gives them random filenames.

There are various legal iPod managers, many of which have an iPod->PC transfer function.

[mjn6172]

iTunes stores the songs as MP3's but gives them random filenames.

There are various legal iPod managers, many of which have an iPod->PC transfer function.

Excellent! I'll give one of those a try. Thanks!