The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: fadingred.org/ Product page
- Price: Free (donations accepted)
Even worse, though, was that I was headed out of town for a week, and my iPod was going to be the sole source of music for use during my early-morning hints updates, and any other writing assignments that came up. What to do...
Then I remembered Senuti, which Dan Frakes covered on macworld.com last year. Senuti helps you move music from your iPod to a connected Mac. Clearly my iPod had issues, but I was hoping Senuti would be able to read some of the data from it, giving me at least a small library of songs to listen to (from the Mac) for the week. (I couldn't transfer everything, because my MacBook's drive lacked the capacity.)
Using a simple iTunes-like interface, Senuti did a great job transferring my music to the MacBook. It did crash a few times when my iPod went into its random restart routine, but I don't blame the app for those problems! Relaunching and skipping the troublesome song worked fine every time. The transfer process in Sentui couldn't be simpler -- select a bunch of songs or albums or playlists in the iPod source entry, and drag them to the iTunes source entry, then wait. Senuti even handles details such as play counts properly.
Thanks to Senuti, I managed to get a good selection of tunes onto the MacBook for the week. I then used the iPod Updater to restore my iPod (all our music lives "for real" on the G5 at home, so nothing will be lost), and let it sync to the MacBook. It seems to be working fine now, so I've got music for the flight home, too.
And yes, pirates could use Senuti to make illegal copies of music. But the truth is that there are tons of tools for copying music from iPods to Macs. The presence or lack thereof of Senuti won't impact a pirate's ability to do what they're going to do -- but personally, I was certainly glad it was available!
(A slightly longer and more detailed version of this writeup will appear on macworld.com later this week; we're a touch busy with WWDC coverage at the moment!)

