An idiots guide, for people like me. Assumptions:

- You want iTunes and your iPod to sync when you are done
- All music from your iPod will sit on your HDD too
- You currently have nothing in your iTunes music directory on your HDD as everything is on your iPod
- You are on an Apple Macintosh

You can be in this situation for a number of reasons:

- HDD replacement, lack of HDD space caused you to delete your music, mad llama attacked your PowerBook

This guide isn’t illegal, unethical or insane. Perhaps the latter. Your music is on your iPod, you want it on your HDD too, fine, lets get to it.

Open iTunes. Select iTunes, Preferences. Then iPod, and press the radio button for ‘Manually manage songs and playlists’. Still in iTunes select Advanced. Deselect ‘Copy files to iTunes Music Folder’. Up to you if you want iTunes to organise your music by selecting ‘Keep iTunes music folder organized’; personally I let it do the organising.

Download xPod from bitcom.ch/products-xpod.html and drag it to your applications folder.

Connect your iPod then run xPod. It should find your iPod.

From xPod select Extras from the drawer, it will tell you how much space is used on your iPod.

Open finder, select the HDD you are using for iTunes and make sure it has more space free than is currently used on your iPod, ideally by a couple of gigabytes. If not, clear down your HDD until you do.

Go back to xPod, press Set, choose your iTunes music folder ‘home-music-iTunes-iTunes Music’

Press Copy Music in xPod. That’s it, you are done copying the files to your HDD - it may take a while to copy across though.

Go back to iTunes, select File, Add to Library. Find ‘home-music-iTunes-iTunes Music’ and select ‘choose’

Now check that iTunes has the same number of tracks as your iPod, look in the status bar at the bottom of the iTunes Window, select your iPod then your Library and compare the two numbers.

If it has, all good. If not, check some of your mp3’s are not 0 byte files or otherwise corrupt by trying to play them.

Select iTunes, Preferences. Then iPod, and press the radio button for ‘Automatically update all songs and playlists’.

That’s it, you’ve finished. Your iPod is now synced up with your Mac and it cost you nothing.

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