Recovering iTunes library - Houston Chronicle (blog)

Q. Admittedly this is more of a policy question than technical, but here goes. I had to reformat the hard drive on my small Vaio laptop that I take on vacations. This is also the computer that I use for iTunes (iTunes is not allowed on my company-issued computer). My question is this: How come iTunes does not allow me to import my music from my iPod Touch into iTunes? I am now having tore-import my CD’s into iTunes which, as you might imagine, is time consuming and not much fun.

A. As to why an owner of an iPod or iPad cannot import their music library from their device into a clean install of iTunes, I don’t have an answer. I would guess it has to do with licensing and copyright issues, but it would just be a guess. It could simply be a limitation of the rather outdated and desperately in need of an overhaul iTunes application.

But your problem is not unique and due to that fact, there are alternatives to re-burning your entire CD collection.

I was recently contacted by a good friend who lost his hard drive due to a hardware malfunction. And, as is often the case with many computer users, he had no backup of the large and extensive music library which he had painstakingly created from his CD collection.

The good news was that he did have every song loaded on to his iPod.

This lead me to do some research and I found a program called CopyTrans 4 which I installed on his PC. This program scanned his iPod and allowed us to restore his music library directly from the iPod back in to iTunes.

The free version only rescued a few hundred songs, but that was all the proof we needed and we paid the license fee and once the program was properly registered, we recovered the entire library in less than a few hours.

There are other programs that claim to do the same thing, but this is the only one I have direct experience with and I would recommend it to anyone looking to recover their music library from their iPod or iPad.

I still strongly suggest that anyone with data that they don’t want to lose make proper backups. But this software was a lifesaver in this situation.