Transferring MP3s from Ipad/phone to PC

Hardware and technical stuff
1

In connection with my recent HD crash, I lost all my music, although I still have much of it on my ipad and iphone.

All the itunes stuff I believe I can redownload from there, which is cool. But being an old foggie, I had a ton of music from CDs that I’ve since discarded. I also have a bunch of personal recordings.

I know itunes doesn’t facilitate transferring non-itunes music back to a PC, but there seems to be a bunch of third party software out there, most of which looks pretty seedy/spammy, so hoping that someone can recommend some legit methods/software to transfer the contents of my ipad or iphone back to my PC?

2

iExplorer is supposed to be pretty legit. Found this article that explains how to use it, though it may be out of date.

3

http://www.i-funbox.com/

4

I had good results with a program called iPod2PC. I really hate paying that kind of money for a program that I used once and will very possibly never use again, but I could not find a viable free option (at least, for Windows) at the time.

5

hmmm, the methods I’m thinking of involve SSH which is only accessible fully on jailbroken iphones/ipads.

Jailbreaking now won’t help unfortunately as a jailbreak reverts the device to factory settings…

I recommend trying out one of the file manager apps mentioned previously, jailbreaking afterwards and installing PwnTunes:

EDIT: Not that it’s very helpful but the folder where itunes stores mp3/m4a files on iOS devices is /var/mobile/Media/iTunes_Control/Music/

6

Just use i-funBox, jeez. You’re overcomplicating it, mashakos.

7

sure a utility works for now, but to avoid the same situation it’s best to jailbreak. Pwntunes exposes the itunes music folder in your ios device to windows/mac osx so you can just drag and drop files from the OS the way you would on a regular mp3 player.

8

If it’s just music, you can use winamp or mediamonkey on the PC to copy the music out of ipods/iphones. Check if these programs support your IOS version / iphone model, though. Sometimes it doesn’t work with the latest models.

9

Just an update on this - I ended up checking out pretty much all the programs referenced above and ended up just using sharepod, which REI recommended above - it was very easy and worked very quickly - I was actually able to reassemble almost all of my library by using different ios devices through sharepod, without having to fuss with duplicate entries, etc.

Getting synched photos from an album on the ipod was actually a lot harder - there are many more music apps. There are some pay software programs, like touchcopy, which seem to work well, but they’re about $30. There are much cheaper/free options on the actual ios app store – the free ones have some limitations, but at least you can sample them to see if you like them, and if you want to purchase them they are only $2 or so – much cheaper than the PC software options. I ended up using the free version of simplTransfer, and to speed things up I eventually upgraded to the pay version for $1.99 and was done the task in a couple of minutes.

Thanks for the help, everyone - pretty happy to get everything back, especially my legal memos, which were pretty important. Belated response, but thought I should post results in case anyone else goes through the same thing.