So I don’t use a modern intranet phone device, I have a flip phone locked up in my truck. Therefore when I wanted music for work I bought an MP3 player and ripped album after album into my PC. Then synced all that music to my MP3. A while back my PC crashed and I had to start it back up from scratch, so I lost the library of music I had.
Can I take the music from the MP3 and load it back on my PC? Can I start another library to add more music to the MP3? What exactly is the relationship between the PC and MP3?
What kind of MP3 player is it? If they’re actually MP3s and not some Apple-owned proprietary format with DRM built in, you should be able to copy them back to your PC no problem.
Without getting into the weeds, an mp3 is a sound file, usually denoted by file extension: “Paint It Black.mp3” or something. They can be any kind of sound, but contain metadata tags (non-sound data embedded in the file) that is most easily used for song categorization: things like track number, song title, album title, artist, publication year, etc. But it’s just a file like any other file stored on your computer.
An mp3 player is a device that can play those sound files. They usually come with a way to sort, categorize, organize into playlists, and display them as well. Usually an mp3 player is a glorified disk drive. They have a file structure just like your PC does, and moving from one to the other is as simple as dragging and dropping files. BUT, “mp3 player” sort of became shorthand for any kind of non-disc digital music player, and often the devices do not actually play mp3s. (This is particularly true of Apple devices.) If the files are not mp3s, then it’s entirely possible that they have some kind of digital rights management overlay attached to them, and they’ll be unplayable if you just copy them over.
So the short answer is, connect your phone to your new PC just like you did before, when you loaded them on to the phone. It should pop up a window that says something like “what do you want to do with this new device?” And you answer “open it to look at files.”
Then it Is just drag and drop between folders. Click on one of the music files and it should start whatever music player program you use on your computer and start playing the mp3 file.
I thought I had read or had some one tell me that it might corrupt what was on the drive if I tried to re-install the library from the MP3 player, but they weren’t sure. It has more than 100 CDs on it and I would hate to have to start over.
What software are you using on your PC? What do you mean by your PC crashed? Did you have to reinstall Windows?
Normally I am able to copy files from my San Disk MP3 players to my PC just like any other file, such as Word document. I have never used third-party software to “sync” my devices.
Yea, Windows 10 just took a dump on me about 8 months ago. I don’t remember what even proceeded it but I don’t recall any “warnings” of impending doom. However after playing with it I was able to get it to re-install Windows 10.
Yea, I know I should have stuff like this backed up.
The “syncing” is actually done in Windows Media Player.
There used to be Sansa mp3 players that mounted to a PC through a Sansa app, but it sounds like YakAttack has ruled that out. But if your PC asks anything about formatting, say no and go do more reading.
And, if you’re successful, consider getting an external usb hard drive big enough to hold a backup.
I never sync any players iTunes style; it wastes time and puts your files at risk. I recommend using straightforward freeware like foobar2000, mp3tag, and EAC/LAME instead of Windows Media Player.
For backup, I have one external HD on my home system and another in a locking drawer at work that I periodically bring home and update, to guard against burglary, fire, EMP weapons, lightning elementals, and gnomes.
I have one I had connected to a previous computer and I need to see if I can use it with this one. I think I was almost out of space (it contains family photos mostly). With the prices on today’s backup drives I should just buy a second one.
