Hi guys a friend of mine has lost all his tunes and has asked me to see if he can get them back. Here is what happened... He set his Ipod up on his girlfriends PC and added all his music using that PC, he then plugged his IPod into his own PC and it said "This Ipod is registered to another PC" and all his tunes were gone. He has since plugged back into the orginal computer (his girlfriends)and his music is all missing!! Is there anyway he can get this back? the tunes cant just dissapear...can they??!! Thanks guys
Yes, Fortunatly, you can access an ipod as a USB disk from a PC. The ipod keeps all its goodies in a hidden folder called something - control. You can connect the ipod and browse it with file explorer see if that holder is visable. If not go to tools/folder options/view and turn on hidden files and folders. That folder should be viewable after you press F5 to refresh the view. You will see plenty of sub folders starting with AAA the AAB ect. That is where your music was. It is still there in some form. Browse one of those folders like AAA is it empty? If it is then google undelete there is a shareware app that will undelete stuff. Install it and have it look at the ?_control folder. You ought to see loads of files with gibberish names with m4a extentions. That is your music. I would undelete everything in the control folder. That might take care of the emmediate problem. At that point I would copy that folder to your PC. Then even if itunes nukes your ipod after reconnecting because it knows your data should be nuked, you still have your music some where safe. If I were your friend I would use a third party software. It is much safer than itunes. You have stumbeled on just one of Apples tricks. Itunes is loaded with tricks for hidden agendas. Most of which are being played on you regularly but are not noticable to the average user. It is not your friend! Third party software just wants to make you happy instead of selling you junky itunes music. See, if you did not know about AD your friend would have to have bought new music! Apple would have proffited greatly from this clever trick! I use Media Monkey. It is very popular and does have a shareware version which is very powerful. The paid for version is only about $20. It is so feature rich you might be confused at first. Once you get used to it there will be no going back to garbage! It also has a great forum with nice people like the AD forums.
I would take the dropping itunes advice seriously. There has been a rash of itunes wiping out music. Your friend is not the only one that has had that problem. Anything Apple 'thinks' is not legit gets erased. It also degrades the fidelity of high fidelity tunes when it puts them on your ipod. Apple figures you are too stupid to figure that out. They do hide the music and change the names to make it much harder to figure out what they are doing.
Hers the real answer. Always! do this before connecting to another itunes or even your own. click "edit" Then click the far right tab Sync (AKA, DELETE) click something that says "disable automatic syncing"
That is only 1 of many dirty tricks itunes plays on you regularly. The rest are not so obvious. It is hard to miss when all your music goes away.
