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The Age

Thursday November 20, 2008

Charles Wright

Charles Wright looks at how to transfer ipod tracks to your computer.

SPARE a thought for one of Apple's most top-secret installations: the Department for Managing the Truth.

As long-term readers may be aware, it's been roughly two years since Bleeding Edge revealed the operations of this then unnamed department, which was set up to deal with customers who insisted on asking a question that Apple did not want them to ask: "How do I transfer the songs on my iPod to my computer?"

It was the department's first challenge, and it came up with a brilliant response: lie to the customers. Apple staff assured callers that it wasn't possible to transfer music from an iPod. It was not only possible, but thoroughly desirable. It could be the only way to recover music collections - possibly representing an investment of thousands of dollars - lost in a hard drive crash.

As anyone selling or supporting iPods must have been aware, the iPod is a miniature hard drive (or a NAND flash memory device) that contains a complete copy of whatever files in the iTunes music library have been installed on it. All that was required to access the music was to put the iPod into disk mode and make the file called iTunes DB visible. It was a simple operation in Windows: bring up the Windows Explorer Tools menu, choose Folder Options/View/Show Hidden Files and Folders, and click on Apply.

We recommended that rather than messing around with the Windows file manager, iPod owners should instead use one of a substantial collection of iPod managers. At the time, we chose a program called PodUtil, which did a good job on both Windows and Macintosh computers.

Since then, however, the Department for Managing the Truth has been working to introduce a degree of truth into its relations with iPod customers, by actually making it impossible to transfer music from an iPod to a computer.

If you've bought an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you might have discovered that your little music box no longer slips into "disk mode". Worse, by introducing complications, Apple insured that software utilities such as PodUtil no longer worked on those later-model iPods.

Unfortunately, this stripped out some of the functionality that Apple had been advertising for years: the ability to use the iPod for disk storage and easily upload documents for offline viewing.

By now, the Department for Managing the Truth had developed more sophisticated techniques. Rather than tell porkies, it simply didn't tell anyone what it had done.

If users dug deeply enough into Apple's support documents, trying to find out why there was no disk mode and less functionality, they'd be dismissed with the following bald statement: "This is expected behaviour."

While it may have been "expected behaviour" for Apple, it certainly was not for any customers who'd used other iPods. In our view, it was a dramatic change to the product's functionality, which was so unexpected that Apple should have been forced to disclose it.

We can only speculate on the reasons: Apple doesn't want users to be able to access system files (it could have found less brutal ways to lock them out); it wants to be able to charge more to add the functionality back; it wants to placate copyright owners leery about unlicensed copying. Who knows?

It's just one more example of Apple's increasing contempt for customers. The Department for Managing the Truth has made Apple's software update an untrusted application on our PC. Apple updates these days seem principally aimed at pushing unwanted software on to customers, nagging them into paying for unnecessary product upgrades or making gratuitous code changes that break competitive software rather than providing genuine new features.

The recent 64MB download of iTunes 8 (almost three times the size of Windows Media Player 11, for instance) added junk such as Bonjour, Apple Mobile Device Support and MobileMe, which was the last straw for Bleeding Edge. We now ignore Apple's updates and instead use the stripped down updates available at ajuaonline.com.

In fact, we're engaged in a process of stripping all Apple software from our Windows box. We'd have replaced iTunes with an alternative such as JRiver's Media Centre (jriver.com) long ago, had it not been for the fact that at the moment we seem to be stuck with running iTunes 8 with the iPod Touch .

Fortunately we've been able to defeat Apple's undocumented iPod crippling with the latest version of PodUtil, which has since been renamed Music Rescue (kennettnet.co.uk). Version 4.0 of that product allows you to copy your music, video, podcasts, audiobooks, recording and notes, even if you've got an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

There's a trial version that includes some nag screens, but we'd suggest the #10 ($A23) licence fee is a worthwhile investment in truth, justice and the non-Apple way.

© 2008 The Age

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