iPod Extraction Made Easy With Senuti
by M. Chris Stevens
A little background
Since Apple first introduced the iPod, there has been one minor annoying aspect to it: as designed, music transfer between your computer and your iPod is a one-way street. Under most circumstances, this is a minor inconvenience. However, when the disk holding your iTunes library decides to take a turn for the worst, this "minor inconvenience" becomes a major hassle. You were pretty much forced to re-rip your entire CD collection again, even though a substantial portion of them were sitting right there in the little firewire drive next to your Mac and you couldn't get them out!!!!
Fortunately, the Mac developer community being what it is, it wasn't long before a few enterprising souls figured out how to get the music out of the iPod. Now we could move music both ways between the iPod and our computers.
Before long, you couldn't swing a dead cat around VersionTracker or MacUpdate without hitting a utility for extracting the music out of your iPod, and since purchasing a 2G iPod in early 2003, I think I've tried most of them at least once. For the most part, they all work about the same - you get a list of songs, select the ones you want, and click some sort of button to copy the files to another disk.
A standout in the crowd
I use my iPod a lot to transfer music from my iPod to my iTunes Library at work, mostly so I don't have to re-rip everything or deal with the annoying mess of syncing the ipod between two computers. I'd used a number of different tools off and on, until earlier this year, when I came across Senuti (think "iTunes", spelled backwards). Immediately, it became my extraction utility of choice.
This little gem is being distributed as freeware, but that wasn't what caught my eye. There are a bunch of different of freeware iPod extractors out there. Unfortunately, I found many of them slow, lacking in features, and/or difficult to use. with Senuti, though, the interface is simple, its easy to find the songs you want to extract, and its pretty darn fast, compared to the other tools I've used in the past.
Taking Senuti for a Test Drive
When you open up Senuti, you get a window that looks something like this.
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| iTunes Lite? Nope! Its Senuti's ultra-simple interface. |
As with many applications, your main tools are along the top. To the left, are the "standard" tools you find on most iPod extractors. There's a "refresh" button, in case you attach an iPod after you open the program. Then, there's a "copy" button, because that's the main function of the program and a "Play" button to allow you to double-check that you're copying over the right song.
On the right are some more useful tools which help set Senuti out from the other extraction tools. The "information" button opens a window that will display all the "song info" data that you would see in iTunes for the currently selected song.
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| Look! A bunch of information that may be useful... |
The Search field is an incredibly handy to have around. It works just like the one in iTunes. Type in what you're looking for, and the options reduce until you find it.
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| Fortunately, "Schoolchildren singing 'Anarchy in the U.K.'" was not found... |
The Playlist button toggles a drawer to the side that contains all the playlists that are synced to your iPod. This becomes quite useful if you, say know that the song you are looking for is in a particular list or if you make a special playlist of songs that you want to transfer.
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| All your transferred playlists - even the unfortunately-named ones. |
As for the song list itself, it also is very nicely done. You can sort by any of the fields, including song, artist, album, genre and rating. This is one of my favorite features. I distinctly remember using another utility that just gave a list of the song file names, in no particular order, with no way to sort them at all (that application hit the Trash rather quickly, I might add).
Another nice feature in the song list is that songs that are already in your iTunes library are "grayed out", adding a visual cue so that you don't accidentally transfer something you already had. However, they are still playable and copyable, so even if you already have it, you can still get a "fresh" copy of it.
However, it does have one minor annoyance. Unlike iTunes, Senuti uses the word "the" when sorting by Artist. So while in iTunes, "The Beatles" will show up under "B", where they are snugly nestled between "Barenaked Ladies" and "Better Than Ezra", in Senuti, they wind up showing up just after "Tencaious D". Its a cosmetic thing, but it does get little irritating, especially if you have a lot of bands that start with "The".
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Simple App = Simple Prefs.
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Preferences are rather simple, with only a couple options regarding setting playback volumes and other options on one panel, and copying options on the other. One of the more interesting options in these preferences was the option to import directly into iTunes. You can even create a "Senuti" playlist that imported songs will get moved to. I found this quite useful, as the songs on my main playlist are converted to Mono (i only have one speaker on my desk, plus it saves space on my hard drive). All I do is select all the songs in the "Senuti" playlist and convert them. When I'm done, I just delete the originals.
Actually using the utility is about as simple as it gets. Just select the songs that you want to copy, and click the copy button. A sheet will pop out so you can tell Senuti where you want to save the files. Simply select the folder. click and watch while Senuti does its thing. Fortunately, you shouldn't be waiting too long, as it actually does its job rather quickly. It took about five and a half minutes to transfer the entire contents of my iPod (641 songs; 1.96 GB) to my Sawtooth's desktop. While that's about twice the amount of time it to to transfer that same amount of information to another firewire drive, I am not exactly using the most recent hardware, either. Faster machines have produced faster times.
The Bottom Line
Alphabetization and transfer issues aside, Senuti is a great little utility that does one thing and does it well. As a freeware/donationware product, there is no reason to keep this 388k file on your iPod, just in case.
Admittedly, there is a lot of legal and/or moral debate over whether or not a tool like this should exist. Like any tool, it can be used for somewhat-less-than-legitimate purposes. However, there are legitimate uses for it as well. And like any tool, you're generally glad to have it when you really need it.
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