I think www.uninniovate.com is becoming one of my new favorite sites. iTunes 7.0 came out yesterday with a great new feature. You can now copy your music from your iPod back to your computer! As always, there's a catch. Only music you bought from iTunes can be copied back to a PC. Music and podcasts downloaded from other services (such as eMusic.com), ripped from CD's, etc. will not be able to be copied back. So Apple finally adds a featrure people have been dying for (like me) and then cripple it almost completely. http://www.uninnovate.com/2006/09/12/apples-itunes-70-a-lesson-on-user-trust/ I don't buy music from iTunes. I rip my music from my CD collection and I do it mostly at work. I hate wasting CD's to just get this music back home easily, or having to copy it to the iPod as a file instead of as music.
Someone HAS hacked a way. Lots and lots of someones. There are many, many, many freeware and shareware methods of doing this that work fine. Hell, if you don't care about your ID3 tags you can do it just by enabling the iPod as a drive and dragging the files off of it. It would be nice if Apple could do it, but it is probably a concession they make to the RIAA and as long as there are third party methods out there, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
You can do this already for music on your iPod. The files are hidden and can be coppied over to your computer then imported back into iTunes, ID3 tags and all.
Yeah, I've done this several times without any extra software. However, the fact that Apple is STARTING to allow it is a step in the right direction. As they lose more market share to Creative, Dell, and other MP3 players, I expect we'll see them fold and support full sharing despite pressure from the record companies not to.