data synchronizationdata transferipod-classicmusic
My Father's iPod (classic) has all of his music arranged and named perfectly.
However, his iTunes is not in sync with his iPod, as his computer hard drive was damaged, and all of his iTunes data lost. Because of this, we have not been able to back up the iPod, and if it is damaged, he will have to rename thousands of songs again.
Is there a way to sync the music from his iPod to his iTunes, or any other possible way to backup the iPod data?
I believe that you can create a smart playlist, limit it to 160 GB (chosen randomly), and then choose to sync only that playlist. At least you can do something like this with an iPhone.
I have an alternative take on this problem:
I have just bought a Classic 160 Gb at Amazon few weeks ago and I have been facing the same issues as you.
I do not use Mac OS X, nor iTunes to sync. I run Linux and I use Media Monkey on a Windows VirtualBox Machine.
During the past two weeks I have tried everything that I could find. iTunes have not even been able to read my entire collection (strange, right?)
I have just restored the iPod firmware a few minutes ago. Started MediaMonkey and sync'd 10 songs from an ordinary random artist. Disconnected and the songs were there, nice. So the iPod is actually working. So far, so good, I have figured that out before.
However, in the meantime, while I was checking my library, I recalled that I have some songs from Japanese bands with Japanese characters in their names. Historically, this would be very error prone. So I did gave it a try, and sync'd 64 songs from that band. Disconnected the iPod and the songs were all gone.
So apparently the 2.0.4 firmware does not handle these characters very well. Check your library, make smaller tests. I am about to restore the iPod again and will try to sync some more files with normal ASCII characters. Will update you.
My old, now dead (waiting for a new disk), iPod, running 1.0.2 was able to hold those files nicely.
Best Answer
Not officially. Syncing is intended to go in one direction: from iTunes to iPod.
That said, there are some third-party apps that will permit this.
https://tunesgo.wondershare.com/music-transfer/transfer-music-from-ipod-touch-to-computer.html
Good discussion on Apple Support: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3991