< Back to Main

Quick Start Guide

This is a quick guide to get your music back to your computer with the minimum of effort. Most of PodUtil's features are skimmed over or ignored - please see the main help sections for detailsed information on PodUtil's features.

First, connect your iPod to your computer, and make sure disk use is enabled. This is a setting in iTunes, and you must open iTunes to change it. You can only change this setting with the iPod conntected.

WARNING: When working with iTunes, you may see a message like this:

It is very important that you click "No" to this window!

Go to iTunes's Preferences, and in the iPod section make sure the "Enable disk use" box is checked. If it's greyed out but checked, that's fine. Click OK to apply the setting.

Note: It is highly recommended that you change your iPod to Manually manage songs and playlists while you're working with PodUtil. This will force disk use to be switched on at all times, and will stop iTunes from trying to update your iPod while you're trying to copy your music back.

Once this is done, your iPod should appear as a removable drive in your My Computer. Next, open PodUtil by choosing it's icon in your Start menu.

You will be presented with a window containing your music. This window has 4 main parts: a list of your playlists on the left, a list of the music in the selected playlist on the right, the Summary Panel on the bottom left and the Copy Settings area at the bottom.

To copy your music, you must do three things:

  1. Select what you want to copy. Any track with a tick by it's name is in the Copy Queue, and will be copied. You can queue all of your tracks by choosing Edit -> Select All, then ticking a track. All selected tracks will be Queued.
  2. Choose your copy destination. Click the Choose... button in the Copy Settings area, and select a folder to copy your music into. Your iTunes Music folder is fine.
  3. Set your Copy Settings. Clicking the Copy Settings... button brings up the window below. You can customise how PodUtil sorts and names your music by tragging tags and typing into the relavant rows. If you want PodUtil to add your tracks to iTunes and rebuild your playlists, check the "Add Track to iTunes" and "Rebuild Playlists" boxes.

Once you've done these three, the Copy button will be enabled. Clicking it will start the copy operation, which can take some time. Once your tracks are copied, PodUtil will then add your tracks to iTunes and rebuild your playlists if you told it to.

Back to top

< Back to Main