Backup Your iPhone / iPod Touch Music Collection [Ubuntu]

One more interesting thing you can do with the packages we installed in our previous iPhone article is to backup the music on your iPhone / iPod Touch back onto a computer again, for example, after a PC crash that rendered your hard disk with your music collection useless. This is not possible with iTunes if the new PC account hadn't been activated before. However, this procedure will only work for non-DRM'ed files.

There are more ways to skin a cat, as they say ...

Backup via GTKpod:

This is the best way to do it: Just right-click on any file and choose "Copy selected tracks to folder" (or similar). Files get copied to your PC with a filename based on their tags. However, copying in GTKpod may not always work. In those cases, choose one of your other options down below.

Backup via Rhythmbox:

You can backup files from your iPhone back on your PC again by simply drag'n'dropping them into a local folder. However, they will have cryptic names (see next section on backing up manually).

Backup manually:

This method is fast but has the drawback that you'll need to do some things manually. Anyway, just double-click on the phone icon that should appear on your desktop after plugging it in via USB. Your music can be found in the directory relative to the iPhone mount point:

iTunes_Control/Music

In there you'll find many folders with numbers such as F00-F49 (or more). In there are your individual music files, but their filenames are destroyed so they now have file names such as libgpod004452.mp3 (for files copied with Linux; files copied with iTunes will have similarly cryptic names, however). The good news is that all tags are still intact so you can easily rename the files automatically again based on the metadata with your favourite tag editor. So, copy the entire collection to your PC again and let your tagger app do the rest.


Note: what's really special about this procedure is that it's not possible with Windows this easily. You can only copy your music BACK from the iPhone on Linux (or using really slow SSH on Windows).

This is a guest post written by StoneCut (thank you very much!). Browse all the posts by StoneCut.