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   DeTune Extracts Your Media from an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch

   Josh Centers

   My wife's music collection was locked inside of an old iPod touch. It's
   so old that the shiny rear panel had rusted, which I didn't know was
   even possible. The problem was that she no longer had access to the
   computer it had synced with ' it's a long and unhappy story, but there
   are a variety of other ways I could imagine it happening.

   This situation exposed one of the annoyances about iOS: its file system
   is locked down. You can connect most other devices to a computer, move
   files back and forth, and be done. But the Apple-approved way of
   transferring files between iOS and Mac is via an iTunes sync, and iOS
   wants to only sync with one iTunes library at a time.

   Fortunately, I discovered a free and easy way to copy my wife's music
   files off the iPod touch: the open-source [1]DeTune from HeadLightSoft.
   It's a tiny 2.9 MB download and requires only OS X 10.5 Leopard or
   later, so just about any Mac user can run it.

   DeTune can retrieve more than just music. It can also extract movies,
   TV shows, ringtones, books, and more, none of which were an issue for
   my wife's iPod touch. However, it does not display album art or see
   photos on a device (those can usually be recovered with iPhoto or Image
   Capture). Nor does DeTune remove any DRM 'protection' on media files.

   Once you launch DeTune, plug in the device you wish to extract music
   from and it should appear in the app. If all you want to do is extract
   all music from the device, that's easily done. In DeTune's left-hand
   sidebar, select Music under your device's heading, click any song, and
   then press Command-A to select all songs. Notice the combined size of
   the files, which is listed at the bottom of the window. Switch to the
   Finder, create a new folder to hold your music (making sure you have
   enough room on that drive!), and drag the songs from DeTune to your new
   folder. If your collection is as large as my wife's (14.8 GB), it will
   take some time for everything to transfer.

   [2][tn_DeTune.jpg]

   You can also view music by playlist if you want to copy only music
   that's in a specific playlist, but in this case, I wanted to get
   everything off the rusting iPod touch so the music could be backed up
   and loaded on other devices.

   The good news is that when the transfer is finished, your music will be
   sorted into folders, instead of being dumped into one messy folder. It
   may not be arranged exactly as you wish, but you can either let iTunes
   sort things out using the metadata embedded in the music files (for
   more information, see Kirk McElhearn's '[3]Take Control of iTunes 11:
   The FAQ') or use a file organization tool like [4]Hazel to do the work
   for you (for more on Hazel, including a 20-percent-off coupon, check
   out Joe Kissell's '[5]Take Control of Automating Your Mac').

   [6][tn_DeTune-extracted-music.jpg]

   Once I copied the music from the iPod touch to an external hard drive,
   I simply dismounted the drive, took it over to my wife's MacBook,
   copied the music to its internal drive, and added it to her iTunes
   library. And then basked briefly in my wife's appreciation of my geek
   heroism. It's nice when a seemingly insurmountable problem turns out to
   have an easy solution.

   Thanks to the folks at HeadLightSoft for providing a simple, free tool
   to recover music from an otherwise inaccessible device.

References

   1. http://www.headlightsoft.com/detune/
   2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-09/DeTune.png
   3. http://tid.bl.it/tco-itunes11-tidbits
   4. http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php
   5. http://tid.bl.it/tco-automating-your-mac-tidbits
   6. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-09/DeTune-extracted-music.png

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