Using Your iPod to Copy Songs from a Mac on to a PC

One important reminder to enable the sharing of music back and forth between an iPod and a Mac or PC: set the iPod for manual update instead of automatically synching it with iTunes (choose Manually Manage Songs and Playlists).

With manual updating, a user is allowed to delete songs in iTunes without losing them in the iPod, the same way that it can keep songs in iTunes as they were removed from the iPod.

To manually setup the iPod in adding and deleting songs, one should connect the iPod to the compuer (Pc or Mac) and open iTunes then select the iPod in the iTunes Source list. By clicking the iPod options button, the iPod preference window will appear and choose the Manually Manage Songs and Playlist is among the option boxes. Click Ok.

Copying songs from iPod to Mac is easy: simply select all the songs and drag them all in the "Library" entry of the iTunes. In some cases wherein this dragging and dropping of files won't work, one can use iPod music file transfer tools such as the free software, Xpod and the application, Senuti.

Copying music from iPod to PC is almost as easy as transferring to Mac with the availability a number of freewares are available for download that will enable to do the process, a good example is the "iPod to PC" transfer software application. Other third party applications for PC are Xplay and iGadget.