Q: I read your tutorial on Copying Content from your iPod to your computer, and followed the steps to manually load my songs from my iPod nano onto my Mac mini and it didn’t work. I put in the command scripts onto terminal as requested and was able to see the iPod_control folder and the music folder when browsing through my iPod, but when I went to iTunes and chose the “Add to Library” that folder wasn’t visible. I tried copying the music folder out of iPod_control, but it still remained invisible to iTunes.
Have others noticed this problem? Is it because I have a Mac Mini? Is it the newest version of iTunes that is stopping this??
– Sarah
A: There is a problem in more recent versions of iTunes that despite the preferences to show hidden files within Finder itself, these folders will not always appear visible to other applications such as iTunes. In some cases, shutting down and restarting iTunes after adjusting the Finder preferences resolves this, but not always.
Copying the content of the “Music” folder back to your computer and importing it from there is normally sufficient, but there’s a much faster way: With the ipod_control folder open in Finder, simply drag and drop the content of the “Music” folder from the Finder window onto the iTunes window.
This produces the same effect as the “Add to Library” menu option, resulting in all of the selected files in that folder and all sub-folders being imported into your iTunes library. Just make sure that you have the Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library option enabled and your iTunes Music folder set correct before doing this, as explained in the tutorial, to ensure that all of the imported files get copied back to your computer.
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