7 years of music....gone :(

[Kamal]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

btw Greg, I haven't tried this, but connect your iPod to your computer, when the iPod appears in My Computer, open the folder, enable viewing of hidden folders and then go into the Music folder and see if anything is visible in it. If not, go to recuva.net, download the program and run a recovery on the iPod and see if it finds your music. If that still doesn't, download and install a program such as GetDataBack and then try to recover the files.

Good luck.

[floridaorange]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

^along a similar vein, I honestly didn't know my mac had a "music" folder that has kept every mix I have ever downloaded until recently. So the music, even though deleted on my itunes, was still stored in a "music" folder. Kind of nice to revisit mixes I had tossed out.

[ddr]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

^along a similar vein, I honestly didn't know my mac had a "music" folder that has kept every mix I have ever downloaded until recently. So the music, even though deleted on my itunes, was still stored in a "music" folder. Kind of nice to revisit mixes I had tossed out.

In itunes advanced preferences, there is a checkbox that, if checked, it will copy any mp3's added to your library to that folder.. so, in effect, you have 2 copies--the one you downloaded and the one itunes automatically copied.

I have always organized my itunes myself just to cut down on wasted space and slowing down of the computer but I can see the advantages for a 2nd, especially if it was hosted on megaupload.com haha

[GregWhelan]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Went into music folder and there is something there - lots of stuff actually. 49 folders from F01 to F49.

Within each one, there are lots of different MPEG-4 files and MP3 files but they all have weird names - all 4 characters long. e.g. GMII, GPGP, NYEW etc.

I can open the MP3 files in windows media player and the file plays - and they are tracks that were on the iPod. I havent opened the MPEG-4 files yet as it will open iTunes and I dont want to do that whilst the iPod is connected.

??

btw Greg, I haven't tried this, but connect your iPod to your computer, when the iPod appears in My Computer, open the folder, enable viewing of hidden folders and then go into the Music folder and see if anything is visible in it. If not, go to recuva.net, download the program and run a recovery on the iPod and see if it finds your music. If that still doesn't, download and install a program such as GetDataBack and then try to recover the files.

Good luck.

[Kamal]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Well then you sound like you're in luck, all your music appears to be intact, the weird filenames is iTunes butchering the naming scheme. If you're lucky, all of the metadata/ID3 tags are still intact.

Right click on the Music folder and see it's size, it should show you the correct number of files (songs) and how many gigs it is, giving you an idea of the extent of the songs still on the iPod.

if you have an external drive, copy and paste the entire MUSIC folder asap, from your iPod to the external drive. That will (all going well) copy all your music files off your iPod to a new location (i.e. back up your iPod). Thereafter, create a new playlist (call it backup) in iTunes and drag and drop the entire music folder from your backup location (on the external drive) into the newly created playlist. That way you can test to see if all your music is intact it.

This will also (if the ID3 tags didn't get fucked because of the iPod crash) display all the available track info in itunes.

If it got ruined, you can recover it using a program such as TuneUp. Now that might not work for DJ Sets but will work for ALL commercially available music (including DJ mixes from series such as Balance, GU etc.).

If the messed up file names bother you, then once you have fixed the ID3 tags, you can use a program such getsharepod to put all the files back onto the iPod and then copy them back down using one of the preset naming schemes and that will also fix the messed up filenames.

Good luck!

[simonr]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Went into music folder and there is something there - lots of stuff actually. 49 folders from F01 to F49.

Within each one, there are lots of different MPEG-4 files and MP3 files but they all have weird names - all 4 characters long. e.g. GMII, GPGP, NYEW etc.

I can open the MP3 files in windows media player and the file plays - and they are tracks that were on the iPod. I havent opened the MPEG-4 files yet as it will open iTunes and I dont want to do that whilst the iPod is connected.

??

You could try adding that folder into your library in i-tunes : you can then play the tracks from there.

[sbando]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Kamal has already explained it, the files are there, with those silly scrambled names (thank you, Steve). Tags are there, there are many apps in Win that can name a file after its tags (a million of them, even in batch mode) so a friend with a PC might be of help.

[jay813]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

i dont get it. ipod died. how does that make you lose the music that you uploaded from your computer? shouldnt you just be able to buy a new ipod and connect it to your itunes?

btw my ipod was stolen a couple of years back and havent messed with itunes since. what i did was use google play. i uploaded 60gb worth of my music and now have access to it anywhere i have an internet connection, including my phone. screw itunes. its all on the cloud now. i do still keep all of my music based out of an external hard drive as a hard copy backup.

i would seriously die if somehow i lost all of my music.

[floridaorange]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

^now we're talkin

[ddr]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Well then you sound like you're in luck, all your music appears to be intact, the weird filenames is iTunes butchering the naming scheme. If you're lucky, all of the metadata/ID3 tags are still intact.

Right click on the Music folder and see it's size, it should show you the correct number of files (songs) and how many gigs it is, giving you an idea of the extent of the songs still on the iPod.

if you have an external drive, copy and paste the entire MUSIC folder asap, from your iPod to the external drive. That will (all going well) copy all your music files off your iPod to a new location (i.e. back up your iPod). Thereafter, create a new playlist (call it backup) in iTunes and drag and drop the entire music folder from your backup location (on the external drive) into the newly created playlist. That way you can test to see if all your music is intact it.

This will also (if the ID3 tags didn't get fucked because of the iPod crash) display all the available track info in itunes.

If it got ruined, you can recover it using a program such as TuneUp. Now that might not work for DJ Sets but will work for ALL commercially available music (including DJ mixes from series such as Balance, GU etc.).

If the messed up file names bother you, then once you have fixed the ID3 tags, you can use a program such getsharepod to put all the files back onto the iPod and then copy them back down using one of the preset naming schemes and that will also fix the messed up filenames.

Good luck!

Very good idea Kamal... now I remember doing this to my old 1st gen iPod and seeing the GWR4G names but ID3 tags in tact... dont know how I didnt think of this but I am glad you did.

Sounds like you are in Luck Greg... just gotta copy everything then rename now, which will undoubtedly take a long time but better than losing everything like you thought you did.

[GregWhelan]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Kamal - if I create a playlist in iTunes called backup and then copy the music folder to it, am I not then putting 40 gig of music on iTunes and hence the laptop? By doing that I'm taking up space on my laptop drive, which I dont want to do as it slows the performance up and takes up a lot of space?

[Kamal]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

It depends on how you have your iTunes setup, if it's not set to keeping your music in another folder (I forget what the option is called), then it will only source the music from your external.

[ddr]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

It depends on how you have your iTunes setup, if it's not set to keeping your music in another folder (I forget what the option is called), then it will only source the music from your external.

My post #33 above. Its in Advanced Preferences in iTunes.

[demonAfro]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Mirrored RAID on local machine, external drive backup, CD(DVD) of a lot of it, cloud synced to several other computers and backed up to a personal cloud server in another country. You'd have to shoot me in the face to stop me recovering data.

[Huggie Smiles]

Re: 7 years of music....gone

Before anyone asks, I didnt back any of it up.

and that peeps, concludes today's lesson.