Restore iTunes from iPod?

[ONUOsFan]

My search only turned up one really old thread on this, so I thought I'd try a new one...

My laptop (our main home computer - we don't have a desktop) was down to 4 GB of free space, so I went out and got a WD 500GB external drive. After copying all of my music, videos, photos and docs to the external drive, I decided that, in the interest of freeing up space (the point of getting the external in the first place), I would point iTunes to the folder on the external drive and delete my music from the HD of the laptop.

Oops. After going through a couple of steps to get my library back into iTunes from the external drive, I now have all of my songs back in there, but my playlists and play counts are all gone, some of my album art is gone, and I have about 400 songs that have screwed up titles (like "03 03 Crash into Me") and no album or artist information, so they're all at the bottom of my library together as one big unknown album. I think this is because I have the "keep my iTunes folder organized" box checked and iTunes "reorganized" everything after importing it - gee, thanks.

I say all of that to say this - I synched my iPod right before I did all of this, so everything is perfect on there. Is there a good/recommended way to just restore my iTunes library from my iPod? I've got a lot of time invested in making sure all of my album art, artist names, etc are correct and organized, and I really don't want to have to do it all over again...

 

[goaliebob99]

As far as your album art, you should be able to manually download all of those to restore them from the itunes store. I belive somewhere there is a selection where you can download that. I dont know about restoring from the IPOD, but the next time you go to sync it could erase your ipod and re synch because it will think that your on a diffrent Itunes library, because the old files might not be there. From past experance, I just pointed to the new folder and restored the album art and everything was there, including playlists. You could try copying the playlists from the Ipod to the playlists in Itunes and see if that works for you.

 

[AZ_Sky]

You might take a look a program called Sharepod, it might let you download your files from your iPod to your computer and then import them into iTunes.
I do use Sharpod but have never tried what you are asking.
Take a look here:
SharePod

 

[jayn_j]

As far as your album art, you should be able to manually download all of those to restore them from the itunes store. I belive somewhere there is a selection where you can download that. I dont know about restoring from the IPOD, but the next time you go to sync it could erase your ipod and re synch because it will think that your on a diffrent Itunes library, because the old files might not be there. From past experance, I just pointed to the new folder and restored the album art and everything was there, including playlists. You could try copying the playlists from the Ipod to the playlists in Itunes and see if that works for you.

I have successfully synched from an ipod to a fresh copy of itunes. It might be better to clear everything out and then start over from the ipod.

I also have had better luck downloading album art from Amazon than from itunes. AQ lot of stuff (like the Beatles) just isn't available on itunes, but the CD section of Amazon has user downloaded cover art on virtually everything.

 

[ONUOsFan]

I have successfully synched from an ipod to a fresh copy of itunes. It might be better to clear everything out and then start over from the ipod.

I also have had better luck downloading album art from Amazon than from itunes. AQ lot of stuff (like the Beatles) just isn't available on itunes, but the CD section of Amazon has user downloaded cover art on virtually everything.

Same here on the Album Art - one of the reasons I'm so worked up about this is that a lot of my Art is stuff I had to put on manually because itunes didn't have it.

Any details on how you did this? I'm not averse to wiping out iTunes and starting over, provided I can get my library to match my iPod...

 

[jayn_j]

Same here on the Album Art - one of the reasons I'm so worked up about this is that a lot of my Art is stuff I had to put on manually because itunes didn't have it.

Any details on how you did this? I'm not averse to wiping out iTunes and starting over, provided I can get my library to match my iPod...

I think it was as simple as installing a fresh copy of itunes and then selecting the ipod and hitting the synch button. Been awhile.

Another thing. It did synch the playlists, but I added the cover art after I did all this, so I don't know if they downloaded images would synch.