Part of the charm and popularity of iPod and iTunes is
that they just make storing and listening to music so
easy. However, for some reason, Apple seems determined
to make copying songs from your iPod to your PC more
and more difficult.

With earlier versions of iTunes, there’s a useful
utility called “iPod Download” that let you drag and
drop files from your iPod to anywhere on your PC.
However, later versions of the product had this
feature blocked.

I can see some of you saying “why would I want to copy
my music from my iPod?” Well, there are a number of
reasons:

1. What happens if your hard disk crashes and you need
   to rebuild your PC? How do you get all your music back
   - and no, I don’t believe that you back up your home PC
   every night!
2. So you’ve gone ’round to your mate’s and he loves
   that new song you’ve been listening to - well how do you
   transfer it to his iPod? (obviously just on a
   temporarily basis!)

So how do you copy data from your iPod? Well, this
great article on Engadget shows you how to do this
using two brilliant free utilities from ephPod.com
and ilinkpod.com. They even show you how to unlock
the “iPod Download” feature in iTunes!

[Andrew Smith]