PodWorks is a Mac OS X application that compensates for the iPod’s only downside: Apple only allows you to copy songs to your iPod. If you have two Macs and want to use your iPod to transfer music from one to the other, or you only store your music and videos on your iPod and need to copy them back onto your hard drive after a disk failure, you are out of luck!

This is where PodWorks comes in: it allows you to copy songs and videos from any iPod or iPhone to any Mac running OS X 10.4 or higher. Its important features include:

* iPhone support: PodWorks recognizes and allow transfers from your iPhone.
* Superior performance: Many other standalone iPod song transfer utilities work by reading song data out of every song on the iPod–a slow process. PodWorks, by contrast, reads its data directly from the iPod’s internal database, resulting in nearly instantaneous display of your song list.
* More metadata: Since PodWorks can read from the iPod’s internal database, it can also display and sort by song “metadata” not available through ID3 (including Date Added, Play Count, and Star Rating).
* iTunes integration: In addition to copying songs to the Finder, PodWorks can send songs, playlists (registered version only), and metadata (star ratings, play counts, track numbers, etc.) directly to iTunes. It can also filter its song list to show you only the songs on the iPod that are not present in your iTunes library.
* Playlists: PodWorks recognizes your iPod’s playlists. Entire playlists can be copied to your computer with a single drag (registered version only).
* Song Playback: PodWorks allows you to preview songs before you copy them by playing them directly off the iPod (not yet available for iPhone).
* Strong organizational capabilities: Copying large numbers of files can get messy, so PodWorks can automatically sort transferred files into directories and change their filenames according to your preferences.
* Portability: PodWorks can be placed on your iPod for convenient access away from your home computer. It will work when run off the iPod, and will remember its registration information even when connected to a previously unknown machine.

Unlike other iPod software to copy songs off the iPod to iTunes, iPod.iTunes does add-synchronization, even in two directions if desired. iPod.iTunes combines easy of use with user guiding and unique features.

Synchronization from iTunes to iPod is especially useful if you want to synchronize from your iTunes library to an iPod which is iTunes-synced with another iTunes library.

iPod.iTunes evaluates the source for content (songs, videos, podcasts and/or playlists) and only adds missing content seamlessly to the target, without duplicates, saving your time.

Unlike iTunes’ own one-way mirror-synchronization iPod.iTunes leaves your content intact, nothing will be deleted during synchronizations (add-synchronization).

iPod.iTunes can also transfer song dependent meta data like “My Rating”, “Last Played”, “Play Count”, album artwork, etc…

iPod.iTunes can be used to:

1.Keep songs/videos and playlists on different Macs and iPods up to date.
2.Do a full restore of songs/videos and playlists from your iPod - i.e. after a hard disk failure or if you buy a new Mac.
3.Revert accident deletion of songs, videos and playlists in iTunes, if these are still on your iPod.
4.Synchronize from iTunes to a “foreign” iPod (an iPod linked/synced to another iTunes library) without deleting the iPod, like iTunes does.
5.Synchronize to a linked/synced iPod without deleting content on it as iTunes’ own synchronization does when content on the iPod is no longer in the iTunes library.
6.Transfer an iTunes library from one Mac to another via an iPod.
7.Clone an iPod (see the application’s Help menu).
8.Backup an iPod. (see the application’s Help menu).

Pod to Mac is freeware that lets you copy or transfer music, videos and playlists from an iPod or iPhone to your Mac and into iTunes.

In Pod to Mac 3.02 numerous bugs have been fixed and several features have been added. Highlights include: (1) Automatic disk-mode hijacking, a feature which switches iPods into disk mode as soon as they are connected to the computer so users can avoid the dangerous “Sync” steps in iTunes typically required to enable disk mode. (2) real-time iPod unloading has been added and now lets you swap between multiple iPods without having to restart the program (this feature existed before for iPhones, but now works on all iPods). (3) A bug causing tracks to transfer as read-only has been resolved and now playcounts and more are being recovered 100% of the time (in internal tests). (4) Several other bug fixes have been added.

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TuneAid is an iPod content recovery tool. It will let you import your iPod’s content back into a Folder or iTunes in no effort.

* All iPods compatible, including iPhone V1, 3G, 3G S & iPod Touch V1 and V2
* One click Import in iTunes
* One click Copy to Folder
* Switching from PC to Mac, Mac to PC ? Doesn’t matter ! TuneAid is natively Cross-Platform
* Non-Geeky interface, TuneAid is dead simple to use without sacrificing powerful features
* Play music directly from the iPod
* High speed Incremental Backups
* Highly tuned Anti-dupe function
* Detailed Copy Stats lets you precisely know if something went wrong
* Many fields supported, such as Play Count, Skip Count, Rating, Last Skipped, Date Added etc.
* Recovers your Playlists with track order preserved
* Search and filtering a click away
* Auto detection feature, just plugin it in!
* Highly customizable preferences lets your transfer the fields your really need
* Special floating copy status window lets you minimize TuneAid and keep an eye on the copy process
* Recover songs from iPods with a corrupted database
* Support for all character sets (including Japanese)
* For iPhone and iPod Touch, no jailbreak needed
* Supports iTunes 8.21
* iPhone and iPod Touch supported OS versions : 1.1.1 to 3.0

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iTunes allows you to copy MP3s from your computer to your iPod, and do everything but copy those MP3s back to your computer. But now with iPod Viewer, you can do just that! Just launch the application, import the songs from your iPod, select the songs you want to copy, choose where you want to copy the songs to, and transfer the files.

* iPod Viewer can now display and transfer AAC-encoded songs that are on your iPod.
* iPod Viewer can now display the playlist information on your iPod. Just click on the playlist name to view the songs in that playlist.
* iPod Viewer can add transferred songs, and the playlists with which they are associated, to iTunes.
* You can have iPod Viewer rename transferred files that would otherwise be duplicates of songs already on your computer.

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