Apple blocks iPod Download ipod ripping tool in iTunes 4.7

November 3, 2004

While a
good number of HDD based MP3 players available allow music to be freely copied on and back off the player via its drive letter, the iPod is one player that getting music back off is not as simple as getting it on, particularly for Mac users. On the other hand, Apple uses one of the most basic methods in hiding music on the iPod by marking the directory holding the music with the 'Hidden' attribute. While users on Windows can still view the contents by enabling the showing of hidden folders or in some applications such as Nero Burning Rom, it is a much more complex process for Mac users unless one is familiar with the OS-X shell.

So, a few Mac programmers have gone out of their way to develop a few tools to make file extraction on the Mac possible with a few mouse clicks. However, the main popular freeware tool "iPod Download" got into legal issues with Apple forking out plenty on lawyers to shutdown any source that offered this tool. When iTunes 4.7 came out, one feature it added was to block any plug-in with the text "iPod Download", thus locking out this tool from iTunes.

Since users can only get music onto the iPod if they have access to it, the only apparent reason why Apple is so strongly against allowing users being able to copy music back off it is to prevent iPod users from using their iPod as a means of carrying music to another PC, that is to keep the music industry happy at a cost of disappointing some of its customers.

Never did we think we'd need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately it's a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. There are already a lot of different ways to copy music off of an iPod, Apple is just choosing to spend a lot of time and resources to make it hard to do. In this How-To we show you several different ways of getting the music off of your iPod and onto both Macs and PCs, all with free tools.

Why do we need to get our files off our iPod?

It would be a wonderful thing to know we'll never have a hard drive failure, a system crash with data loss or our computer stolen, but that's not reality. In our world, those things happen and once you've spent the time, money and effort to put music on your iPod, there isn't any reason it should be locked away. We've needed to do a fresh install of the operating system for every computer we have ever owned (yes, including Macs), and sooner or later plenty of users will need to do the same, either because of a physical defect which requires new hardware, or to eliminate any of the spyware, viruses, and other exploits which are part of the computing experience these days. Back-ups are great, but we can't always back-up our entire library of music. And besides, why should we, it's our music on our iPod?

Last week we posted our observation that the new new version of iTunes 4.7 disabled a popular and useful utility called 'iPod Download" which lets you drag and drop files from the iPod to anywhere you choose. Apple added some blocking code to stop the plug-in from working, and later in this How-To we'll show you how to enable 'iPod Download" with a HexEditor in the Mac section.

Read the full article here.

While many HDD based portable player manufacturers (particularly Windows Media Center based ) use strong encryption to prevent music from copied off, it seems rather odd for Apple to use a simple 'hidden file' folder attribute as its anti-piracy measure, but then again it turns out quite effective on a Mac.

In Windows, a slightly more secure method of hiding a folder would
be to apply a 'system' and 'hidden' attribute since hidden folders
with this attribute cannot be viewed directly in the Windows Explorer
interface, although they can in some programs such as the command prompt
and again in Nero. Going even more secure would be to append a
Class-ID. For example, try creating a folder called 'Test', copy some
files into it an rename the folder to
'Test.{06DD38D3-D187-11CF-A80D-00C04FD74AD8}' which adds an Active-X class-ID
extension. This time the folder can no longer be viewed in either Windows
Explorer, Nero or most other software apart from the Command Prompt, although it
can still be deleted.

Then again, if users can freely transfer music to and from CDs, pen-drives, portable hard drives, then using a portable audio player with mass-storage capabilities should be no different. For example, if an iPod user suddenly encounters a hard drive crash in their Mac or PC or their computer is stolen, then they should be freely entitled to get at least their music collection back off their iPod once they get a replacement computer.

Feel free to discuss about the iPod and other portable audio hardware on our Audio Forum.

Source: engadget