MousePotatoPower

You’ve seen how easy it is to find your music on your iPod, and even without any extra software, you can simply drag and drop it back onto your computer.

The next problem is finding a particular track on your iPod without having to sort through all 50 of your F-directories. And again, it can be done easily, this time with a free program.

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Getting music off of our Ipod is easier than I thought. Getting 1 specific song off of your Ipod is a little harder, but it can still be done for free.

• Plug in your Ipod
• In iTunes, enable disk use. This will turn your iPod into a USB drive
• Open up My Computer
• By default, the music on your iPod is hidden, let’s reveal all of the hidden files.
• Select Tools > Folder Options
• switch to the View tab
• select Show hidden files and folders
• click on the Apply button, then click on OK

• Open your iPod (mine is L:)
• go to the ipod_Control\Music directory
• Here you will find subfolders that contain your music

Although the file names are coded, if you have labeled your music, the ID3 tags will contain all of the necessary information (artist, album, song name, etc).

If you mouse over any of the files, you will see the ID3 tag information

If you want to, you can copy all of the music to your computer.

Of you can grab another piece of software to view all of the track information (tutorial to follow this weekend).

Get Music Off Your Ipod

Windows XP can do a lot, but there are a lot of things that it can’t do. Stay tuned for weekly posts about cheap and free software that will make you more productive.

The first piece of essential software is WinRAR. Currently at version 3.70, WinRAR can create and read compressed files (archives) of just about any file format that you can find on the web including: zip, rar, lzh, tar, gz, tar.gz, bz2, iso, and handful of others that I have yet to encounter.

The integrated ZIP-file utility that Windows comes with is alright, but for free, there’s really no reason not to use WinRAR.

Head to the RARLab’s download page and grab the most recent version of WinRAR.

I’m not a fan of Microsoft. But then again, I can’t help but use Windows XP.

Now that I’ve been using Firefox for the past year or so, looking at Internet Explorer 7 is just painful. It’s ugly, they re-arranged the menus so that you don’t know where anything is anymore. It’s kind of screwed up, just like Vista. At least Vista looks pretty.

Anyway, Firefox is my web browser of choice for a few reasons.

• It’s free
• Firefox includes a Google search bar, so I can search from anywhere, no more jumping back to Google.com to find anything
• Tabbed browsing, nuff said
• Nearly unlimited extensions to add features and customize
• It’s portable and can be installed on a flash drive or Ipod
• It’s not Microsoft

Download it here and come back to see more Firefox tweaks in the future.