A few months ago my external hard drive carrying my iTunes Library failed and the only copy of my music was on my 80gb iPod Classic. I've looked for many different third party recovery apps, but most of them cost a fee, or the ones I found that were free didn't retain info like ratings, play count, album art, etc.
I did use
Songbird 1.2 to recover the information from my iPod just so I had a copy of my files in case my iPod failed too. Now i'm a big fan of Songbird, and I think it has potential to become way better than iTunes, but for now, there are several features that I can't live without, like full audiobook support and with an 80gb ipod, just mounting the device took me the better part of an hour. This was pretty unacceptable, so I decided to switch back to iTunes.
Today I finally found the perfect solution, and it was
SharePod. This is a totally free app with no spyware or anything (doesn't even have an installer, you just extract a zip file and run the stand-alone file). I was able to import into a clean install of iTunes from my iPod, my entire library. I can't be any happier at the moment. I never mind recommending a product to someone that I've used personally and works exactly as advertised. I just wish I had found this program sooner. Once my life settles back down in a few months, i'll be sure to give the author a donation for such a great product.
So if you're looking to recover your library (or want to copy your library to another machine) this is a great tool. Thanks SharePod!
I normally ramble about food, tech, photography and tennis (they're the things i love).