Moving music from iPod back to iTunes: PodWorks Review

Well, I just had my Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500GB external hard drive crash. I had loaded somewhere between 200 and 300 GB of music onto my iTunes library. The good news is the drive was under warranty, the bad news is the drive is in no condition to recover the data, without sending it to a third party service. The fee for some of these companies start at $500!

I did a Google search to see how I could at least send the approximately 40 GB of music (and luckily 95% of my purchased iTunes) from my old iPod back to my (replacement) hard drive. One site said to download the free TinkerTools so that you could open the hidden iPod_Control->Music folder on the iPod. This worked, but it was very confusing what to do once I got to this point. I clumsily moved the entire Music folder onto the hard drive, and followed the next few steps to clean up the mess of music, but didn't have much luck.

Today I read about a few software packages (some free, others at a small fee for the full version) that would assist me moving my music back where it belongs. Senuti (itunes backwards) moves your music back to your computer, and it's free. The next one I read about was PodWorks, which got good reviews, and was supposed to prevent duplicating songs in your iTunes library. They allow you to use it free for 30 days and up to 250 song transfers. I figured for $8 I would splurge (especially since I want to move around 2,700 songs) and buy the full version. It was very simple to pay for and download online.

So far it couldn't be simpler! I clicked on my iPod name, and then clicked on Send All to iTunes and let it do it's thing. The version I downloaded was 2.9.3. I was going to see if folks compared Senuti to PodWorks, but didn't want to spend too much time agonizing over an $8 piece of software that got generally positive feedback. I would be interested to hear other folk's experience with moving their music back onto their computer, since Apple kind of planned for this to be a one-way flow of data (mostly to prevent folks from sharing their library with all of their friends for free).