Transfer music to your iPod via the command line
Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks, Command Line
Most of us use iTunes to transfer files to and from our iPod, but apparently you can also use the command line. Sasha Ingbram writes in with this tip: “I realize this is a controversial position to take, but I’m not always thrilled with iTunes and how long it takes to get things done. For me, going through the command this is much faster and more efficient rather than launching iTunes and waiting for the store to load and everything else. I found that you can transfer data to your iPod through the terminal though by using the following command:
cp -R /Volumes/YourIpod/iPod_Control/Music /Users/YourUserName/Music
of course you have to fill in your iPod name rather than YourIpod and your username rather than YourUserName.”
Thanks Sasha! We haven’t been able to test this one right now because we don’t have an iPod laying around at the moment, perhaps someone else can try it out.
Mac Deals from the Apple Store:
Social bookmarks:
- del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | ma.gnolia | Netscape | reddit | StumbleUpon | Yahoo MyWeb |
Comments:
Comments: 6
Comment from Matt Swain
Time: March 29, 2007, 11:54 am
Yeah, this seems to work, but takes ages for me - I think might copy every single music file instead of syncing the ones that have been changed since your iPod was last updated.
I also had problems with the name of my iPod - “Matt’s iPod”. It seems it doesn’t like punctuation like apostrophes in the file path. I’m sure there is a way around this that regular command line users will know, but I just temporarily renamed my iPod to try out the command.
Comment from anon
Time: March 29, 2007, 12:18 pm
Works, but it does seem a bit slow to me too, so I don’t know how great of a tip this really is. Maybe it’s just percieved slow because theres no status bar
@Matt:
There’s probably a better way but I just put double-quotes around something that has a apostrophe in there, so in your case it would be cp -R /Volumes/”Matt’s iPod”/ or whatever. I’m no command line expert though so I’m sure someone will come along with a better way
Comment from MariusTh86
Time: March 29, 2007, 1:49 pm
@Matt You can also put up apostrophes around the entire path like: “/Volumes/Matt’s iPod/”, this puts the whole thing in a single string and feeds it to the command line.
Or you can escape characters by putting a slash in front of odd characters and spaces like so: /Volumes/Matt\’s\ iPod/
Comment from Nick Brogna
Time: March 29, 2007, 5:23 pm
@Matt: You hit the nail on the head. ‘cp -R’ in UNIX-land is a recursive copy, so all that is happening is the contents of your music folder is being copied to the music folder of your iPod. Nothing more, nothing less. And to get around spaces and punctuation on a command line escape the special characters and spaces with a single backslash, like so…
/Volumes/Matt\’s\ iPod/
Comment from LKM
Time: March 30, 2007, 4:42 am
Uhm… Doesn’t that transfer *from* the iPod *to* the Mac? Weird.
Comment from ha.
Time: June 6, 2007, 8:19 pm
It Does..
Write a comment