Apple makes it pretty easy to copy music to your favorite iDevice. It makes it much harder to copy music from a device back to your computer.
Why would you want to do this? Well if for some reason you lose or delete some music from iTunes and you have copies of those song on your iPhone. Or you may just want to copy some songs from a friend’s device. Of course just copying music may well be breaking the music rights or what’s called DRM. But hey if you need or want to copy music from an iDevice here’s how you can do it.
There are a bunch of tools available that claim they can help you but don’t seem to work out in reality.
When we find a solution that works we are more than happy to mention and do a short review.
For Windows users the best solution is Sharepod from Macroplant. They have built a fantastic little application that just works. You can download a trial version which is good for 30 days of pump up and pay $20. They also offer a more advanced version that will copy all the data from a device not just music.
What’s great is there is virtually no setup. It magically finds iTunes and your iTunes library. Once you connect your device you can see instantly, and it is instantly you can see what songs are not in your iTunes library. Songs not present are marked with a green dot. You can then copy them over. It’s as easy as that.
Macroplant also offer a MAC version. As the Windows version was so good we did not try the MAC option.

