If you have ever owned an Apple product then you know they are easy to use and built to the highest quality standards but also limited to the rules and regulations put in place by Apple that dictate how you can use their device.  As expected, Apple makes it easy to put music, movies and files on your iDevice but they made the data transfers a one way street. It is not possible to use iTunes to copy anything back to your computer once it is on your iPod or iPhone.  It can be faily difficult to find a good solution to this delima, let alone a free solution to the problem amongst the many choices available. You could spend the better part of your week sorting through your options, or you could just read this post instead.

Here’s a look at some of your best options for transferring media from your iPod or iPhone back to your computer, free of charge. We’ve added solutions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so just choose the one that applies to you.

Windows

Copy Music from Your iPhone, or iPod back to Your Computer for FreeFor quite awhile, there was no good solutions available for Windows, for the problem of transferring media from iDevice to computer. Thankfully Sharepod came along and made the world a better place—at least for those of you Windows users with music trapped on your ‘pods. Not only can SharePod transfer the entire contents of your library, but it can also make any changes you want without iTunes. You can download SharePod here. Once you’ve got it installed, here’s how you access your stuff:

1.Connect your iDevice to your Windows PC.

2.Open SharePod. (If you open SharePod prior to connecting your iDevice it will start looking for it immediately and may conclude nothing is connected.)

3.Choose the specific songs/files you want and click the large “Copy to computer” button in the upper lefthand corner of the SharePod window. Alternatively, if you want everything, click the “Backup iPod” button instead.

4.A window will pop up and ask you to choose a location. Decide where you want to transfer the music and how you want them to be organized. When you’ve made up your mind, click the “OK” button.

5.Wait while SharePod transfers your music.

That’s all there is to it. If you simply want to play music, just double click on any file in your library and SharePod will start playing it. It’s incredibly simple to use.

Mac OS X

Copy Music from Your iPhone, or iPod back to Your Computer for FreeIf you are a Mac OS X user, the program Senuti. (That’s iTunes spelled backwards, if you were wondering) had been available for quite a while.  Senuti is very simple to use and can transfer your music back to your computer with just a few clicks.  Although Senuti used to be free it has been recently changed to a 30 day trial that allows you to transfer up to 1,000 songs during the trial period.  If you are interested in getting your hands on the older FREE version of Senuti, you can download it from us here.

Here’s how it works:

1.Connect your iPod or iPhone to your Mac and open Senuti.

2.When you first launch Senuti you’ll be asked a variety of setup questions before you can get started. Don’t skip past this process because you’ll be asked to set where your music will be copied and whether it’ll automatically be added to iTunes. You want to know where your music is going to end up when you’ve finished copying it so don’t click-through and ignore these options.

3.Once you’re done you’ll see the main Senuti window. It’ll look like a simplified version of iTunes, with all your playlists on the left and your music/media on the right. Just search for the songs that you want to transfer, or select them from your library, and click the Transfer button in the upper left-hand corner of Senuti’s window.

4.Wait while Senuti transfers your music to the place you chose during the setup process and adds it to iTunes automatically (if you decided you wanted it to do this, also during the setup process).

That’s it. Senuti is a remarkably simple app that takes no time at all to figure out how to use.

Linux

Copy Music from Your iPhone, or iPod back to Your Computer for FreeLinux users should check out gtkpod. As far as we know, it’s really one of the only ways to sync an iPod or iPhone in Linux at all. They offer in-depth documentation on how to do everything from just connecting your iDevice to copying files back to your computer.  If you are not a Linux user, you may find these instructions a bit difficult to follow but once you get the hang of how it works it should get easier to use.

Here’s how it works, according to gtkpod’s documentation:

1.Mark the tracks you want to export and select “Export Tracks from Database” from the file menu (or use the context sensitive menu).

2.A file selection dialog window appears and you can choose the directory you’d like the selected files to be written to.

3.You can specify the output filename in the prefs dialog by specifying a template (e.g. “%A/%a – %t”). You can specify multiple templates for different file formats by separating them by a semicolon (e.g. “%A/%a – %t.mp3;%t.wav”). See the tooltip in the preferences window for a list of identifiers.


Although we haven’t spent much time with it, it looks to be your best (and potentially only) option on Linux for managing and backing up your iPod or iPhone . If you have experience with gtkpod or another Linux option you like better, let us know in the comments.

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