podUP is a simple application that was built for one purpose and it does it very well -- retrieving songs from your iPod.
In the past, I've had friends come looking for me asking me for help with their iPods. Their complaint was that there were songs in their iPod which were not showing up in iTunes. They didn't want to re-sync it again in case they lost it, so they came to me. Luckily, I had this program handy.
podUP offers a hassle-free, one-click process to download all the songs from your iPod onto any folder on your Mac. It doesn't interact with iTunes and it doesn't matter who the iPod or Mac belongs to. It just works, no questions asked. So if you want to backup your iPod music to your Mac computer then definitely check it out.
Being a one-click sort of program, this means that when I want to retrieve a single song, it cannot be done. If I want to download 5 songs from a 80GB iPod, I should have to wait until it copies everything. But that is besides the point. The main theme of this article is backing up your iPod, so podUP still offers an easy-to-use solution.
After loading the application, all you need to do is drag your iPod (provided that you've connected it) icon from the desktop into the application window. It will then tell you how many files there are in your iPod to be copied. podUP copies all of your songs onto a folder of your choice. When it's done, it will automatically arrange the files into folders by artist (very much like how iTunes does it). The songs in the iPod will be left untouched and unharmed. DRM-protected songs will also be copied but they can only be played in the computer it was bought with, so we're not violating any copyright laws here.
Depending on how much you are transferring or how full your iPod is, the transfer time may vary. From my experience, it took me slightly more than 10 minutes to completely copy an 8GB iPod Nano.
If there is a need for you to stop the transfer, just press and hold the left control button. podUP remembers which songs have been copied and will continue from where it left off.
podUP is free and is currently only available for the Mac.
If you're on Windows and you need to get songs off your iPod, check out these articles:
Are you familiar with any other iPod backup programs? Let us know in comments!