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How to transfer songs from iPhone to the computer

Transfer songs from iPhone to PCHaving an iPod or iPhone is great because you can carry your favorite music anywhere. The problem comes when you want to copy any of those songs from the Apple device onto your computer: iTunes simply doesn’t let you do it.

So here I was, with tons of cool music from my home PC loaded into my brand new iPhone and totally unable to save it to the office PC! I was sure there had to be some way round this absurd limitation… and yes, there is one! After doing some Google research I finally came up with a solution to transfer songs from iPod Touch or iPhone to the computer and viceversa. It’s fast, easy and best of all, free.

This trick works with Winamp, but requires you to have iTunes on your system as well because it installs a special USB driver that enables communication between the iPhone and the computer. Once you have both apps installed, download and install the ml_iPod plugin for Winamp too and follow these simple steps:

  1. Close iTunes – if it’s running – and launch Winamp.
  2. Plug your iPhone to the computer with the USB cable.
  3. Winamp will show a small window saying “Transfer of metadata”. When this window closes, the iPhone music library will appear on the Winamp Media Library under “Devices”.
  4. Now you can freely copy songs from the iPhone to the computer by selecting those files on the iPhone list and choosing “Copy to Hard Drive” in the context menu. Syncing also works the other way round: select files on your local media library and transfer them to the iPhone by selecting the “Send to” option in the context menu.
  5. When you’re done, eject the iPhone from Winamp. Now you’ll have to force the iPhone to reload the song database (otherwise it would use a cached one). Simply launch the iPod application and then press the Home button for about five seconds until you return to the home screen. Then launch the iPod tool again and your newly transferred songs will be right there. Enjoy!

Reader comments

  1. softonik makin ngetop



  2. My hard drive crashed. Thank you for this!!!



  3. where does the music go after you copy the songs to the hard drive?



  4. Hi Christina! They’re saved in the folder you specify in Winamp’s preferences. Open the Preferences menu by pressing Ctrl+P in Winamp and go to iPod Support > Transfers. Then click on the Download tab and there you’ll be able to set a destination folder for the songs you copy from the iPhone to the hard drive.



  5. supwer



  6. That was awesome .. Thnx so much!



  7. This destroys 2.0/3G iPhones - beware!



  8. Hi The Captain! I’m not sure what you mean by “destroys”. I’ve used this trick with my first generation iPhone updated with the 2.0 firmware and it works perfectly well.



  9. Watch out!
    You should change the preferences before you ripp any music off otherwise by default it will fill your C: drive with loads of folders, one for each artist you’re copying.



  10. Another word of advice:
    All the music and videos on my phone were wipped out after I used this sofware. It’s not really a big deal as they are all backed up on my computer, but it was a bit of a pain to have to re-format the phone and restore it to the latest saved backup.
    I think Apple must have done something in the latest patch to stop this plug-in from working. I’m using a 3G, version 2.0.1



  11. what the hell why did my ipod song list albaphetical order mess up, now the order is p,z,.,n,.,123,etc. help me



  12. how do you transfer songs/videos/pictures from computer to iphone?



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