angryHere's a comment I just sent to Apple's iPod feedback:
My iPod is paired with my Power Mac G5. I have 6 GB of music and videos on it. After the hard disk in my Power Mac died, the iPod is the only place I have that content. Unfortunately, even though that content exists on my iPod, there appears to be no way I can restore it to my hard disk.
I understand that Apple is trying to keep people from using iPods to pirate music, but there are definitely circumstances in which copying from the iPod back to a computer is both legitimate and necessary. As it is, if this were all music from the iTunes Music Store, I'd be out a substantial amount of money to replace that content - and would be extremely irate.
The support rep at AppleCare told me that it's a copyright issue. It's not. I legitimately own the content, and am not creating any more copies than I had before the drive failure.
What sets Apple apart from the mass of other portable music players out there is not the iTunes Music Store, or the iPod's design, or anything like that. What it comes down to is that Apple's ownership experience is head and shoulders above the rest. This is a serious flaw in that experience: the data exists, but I cannot recover it, and Apple appears to believe that all of their customers are criminals who would steal music at the drop of a hat if they were allowed to do so. That's completely out of character.
I like my iPod, but if I can't recover the data from it when I have a real and legitimate need to, I'll buy something else the next time around.
Update: iPodDisk worked fine. I've recovered the whole library. I'll have to rebuild the playlists manually, though...
