How do you recover itunes purchases

[tyedye]

Our hard drive and pc died and I do not have itunes songs purchased backed up. What is the best way to recover our purchased songs? Is using a program designed to copy stuff from the ipod's back to itunes/pc the easiest? All purchased songs were on at least one of our ipods.

 

[disneyismyname]

This happened to me when I was new with Itunes/Ipod. My pc died and I never knew to "back up" my music!
What I did was emailed itunes with my problem..they gave me a stern warning "Back up your music" and gave me 75% of my songs back on my itunes.

Now I back them up with a disc. I have more than 500 songs and need 5 blank cds to write the songs on.


And when I put my Ipod in a blank itunes library the pod turned blank as well!

 

[tyedye]

If they will only give 75% of my purchases to me then maybe I'm better to try software to get the contents of the ipod transfered back to the pc so I don't lose anything. Has anyone done this and if so what program did you use?

 

[Jestocost]

If they will only give 75% of my purchases to me then maybe I'm better to try software to get the contents of the ipod transfered back to the pc so I don't lose anything. Has anyone done this and if so what program did you use?

I have done it using PodUtil, which is a shareware program available for download. It was easy to use and all of our songs were recovered.

 

[CoMickey]

I have done it using PodUtil, which is a shareware program available for download. It was easy to use and all of our songs were recovered.

Hi - I am having this same issue. I got a new laptop and before switching them out I thought I had backed up my Itunes Library to my external hard drive but I found that I only backed up some of the music. All of my music is on my Ipod now. Did the PodUtil program take all of your music from your Ipod and restore the music into your Itunes Library? That is what I need.

 

[bicker]

Zune Marketplace will allow you to restore all the WMAs you purchase from them five times, no questions asked.

 

[RunningGirl]

Same thing happened to me and Apple helped me get all my music back. I'd give them a call! If they won't, do a search on the web. I had done that first and the instructions they gave me were identical to some I'd found on an Apple forum.

 

[DebIreland]

iPodRip is excellent. It's $20 for the full version or there's a free limited version too. It's worth downloading to see if you like it and if you do, then you can pay the $20 for a registration code. It's always worth investing in a good external hard drive to back up your computer files regularly (I speak from experience of having lost everything more than once!)

 

[Jestocost]

Hi - I am having this same issue. I got a new laptop and before switching them out I thought I had backed up my Itunes Library to my external hard drive but I found that I only backed up some of the music. All of my music is on my Ipod now. Did the PodUtil program take all of your music from your Ipod and restore the music into your Itunes Library? That is what I need.

Yep. That's exactly what it did. We had nothing backed up (I do now) and with PodUtil we were able to pull all of the music off of the iPod and put it back into iTunes on a new computer.

Apple might help get some of the music back that you purchased from iTunes. If you've ripped CDs into your computer, you'll have to do that all over again, and if you have music from other sources, like Amazon MP3s or from eMule or something, forget it. In those scenarios, pulling it back off of the iPod and onto the computer is the only solution and that will require some form of third-party software.

 

[OK!]

I'd also check ilounge.com; they have a thorough evaluation of the many ways to restore music/video from your iPod to your computer and also set-by-step instructions for many different programs. Both my brother and I have used various methods described there with total success.

Good luck!

 

[tyedye]

Yep. That's exactly what it did. We had nothing backed up (I do now) and with PodUtil we were able to pull all of the music off of the iPod and put it back into iTunes on a new computer.

Apple might help get some of the music back that you purchased from iTunes. If you've ripped CDs into your computer, you'll have to do that all over again, and if you have music from other sources, like Amazon MP3s or from eMule or something, forget it. In those scenarios, pulling it back off of the iPod and onto the computer is the only solution and that will require some form of third-party software.

Using PodUtil will we be able to transfer everything from our ipod including songs that were purchased from itunes to another computer with itunes? That is really what I'm interested in as our ipods are the only place those songs are. The rest of the cd's we had on the ipods I can add to itunes whenever as I own the cd, I'm more concerned with the itunes purchased songs.

I am usually good about backing stuff up, but unfortunately had forgotten about itunes so it has been about 1 yr since I backed it up. Thank goodness I recently backed up all my photo's to my external drive.

 

[browneyes106]

My bf also used iPodRip to restore his library and it worked well. I backup all my purchases to an external hard drive and every month I make backup discs.

 

[Feralpeg]

I have almost 5000 songs and 10 television shows on my Ipod. I can't imagine how many discs that would take to backup. Anyone have a better alternative than burning discs?

 

[Kathi OD]

I have almost 5000 songs and 10 television shows on my Ipod. I can't imagine how many discs that would take to backup. Anyone have a better alternative than burning discs?

Peg, get a self-powered external hard drive. Last time I looked, you could get a decent 500GB one for around $100-$125. In order to back up that many songs and shows it won't be much more than the cost of all the cds you'd need; plus you'll still have more room for new files, which will be arranged exactly how they are on your hard drive. You'll just have to make sure to backup any new files you acquire on a regular basis.

 

[Jestocost]

Using PodUtil will we be able to transfer everything from our ipod including songs that were purchased from itunes to another computer with itunes? That is really what I'm interested in as our ipods are the only place those songs are. The rest of the cd's we had on the ipods I can add to itunes whenever as I own the cd, I'm more concerned with the itunes purchased songs.

I am usually good about backing stuff up, but unfortunately had forgotten about itunes so it has been about 1 yr since I backed it up. Thank goodness I recently backed up all my photo's to my external drive.

It worked that way for us. We had songs from several iTunes accounts as well as from CDs and other sources. The only hang up is if a song is already maxed out in terms of the # of computers on which it can be authorized to play (I think it's five). If that's the case, then it will load onto your computer and into iTunes, but it won't play and you will get a message to that effect.

 

[CoMickey]

My bf also used iPodRip to restore his library and it worked well. I backup all my purchases to an external hard drive and every month I make backup discs.

Thanks everyone for all of your suggestions!

Did the iPodRip restore everything even the CD's that were on your Ipod? I am too lazy to have to go back and add all of the music from my CD's.

 

[Green Tea]

I used PodWorks which was recommended in some computer magazine. It cost $8 but I have moved songs from multiple ipods back into my itunes.

 

[browneyes106]

Thanks everyone for all of your suggestions!

Did the iPodRip restore everything even the CD's that were on your Ipod? I am too lazy to have to go back and add all of the music from my CD's.

It restored all the songs on the iPod whether there were purchased downloads or CD rips. My boyfriend had about 100 songs that were purchased and about 400 songs he had were from CD's.

 

[tyedye]

I ended up using PodUtil which is now Music Rescue. First I logged into itunes from the pc and set it up to use with our login and it loaded all our purchased songs (this was only the 2nd pc used so we were not at the 5 limit). Then I connected the ipod and used Music Rescue and it transfered all our previously loaded cd's from the ipod to itunes. Now when I go to itunes it looks like it's added another playlist of the ones it transfered? Is that right as I don't want to lose anything. I guess I could just leave the extra playlist there but not synch it and it won't do any harm, right? The playlist doesn't take up much hard drive space as it's just the list, it's not like it duplicates all the song in each list?