

Nor does DeTune remove any DRM “protection” on media files. However, it does not display album art or let you see photos on a device (those can usually be recovered with iPhoto or Image Capture). It can also extract movies, TV shows, ringtones, books, and more, none of which were an issue for my wife’s iPod touch. It’s a tiny 2.9 MB download and requires only OS X 10.5 Leopard or later, so just about any Mac user can run it.ĭeTune can retrieve more than just music.

But the Apple-approved way of transferring files between iOS and Mac is via an iTunes sync, and iOS wants to sync with only one iTunes library at a time.įortunately, I discovered a free and easy way to copy my wife’s music files off the iPod touch: the open-source DeTune from HeadLightSoft. You can connect most other devices to a computer, move files back and forth, and be done. This situation exposed one of the annoyances about iOS: its file system is locked down. The problem was that she no longer had access to the computer it had synced with - it’s a long and unhappy story, but there are a variety of other ways I could imagine it happening. It’s so old that the shiny rear panel had rusted, which I didn’t know was even possible.

My wife’s music collection was stuck inside an old iPod touch.
