iTunes has a limitation which I find severe but understandable. It doesn’t allow you to copy songs from your iPod to other computers indiscriminately. It only lets you link it up to one assigned machine (or apparently five, though I have no idea how). This is to prevent undue copying of music accross computers, also known as PIRACY. BUT this limitation is very bad if you lose your computer’s music collection or even if you just backup the iTunes music files (if you can find them, and even if you tell iTunes to use some other directory, it insistently and annoyingly places the library database in the EVIL “My Documents” folder). Just backing up the files isn’t enough you see, because I like to have playlists and music library auditions sorted by rating - but the ratings don’t backup with the files. I’ve meddled with exporting the library and re-importing it and either not known how to preserve ratings or they don’t preserve.

But I found a program that lets you copy from you iPod to your computer and/or iTunes and preserves the music ratings. I use this for backup purposes only (that’s legal - but it’s possible to do illegal things with this). I’ve found that in addition to backing up songs from the iPod to my computer, it creates this iPodBackupLibrary_1.xml file which imports into iTunes successfully and keeps the music ratings intact. Now if I just import from that file to iTunes (and the directory of music files backups it is with) and set iTunes to copy music to its own folder on import (via Edit->Preferences->Advanced-> the checkbox that says “Copy Files to iTunes music folder..”), I’ve got a hard drive backup, my iPod’s copy, and my iTunes copy. Three copies with ratings intact. Excellent.

The shareware that does this (and limits it to 100 songs until you purchase) is called CopyPod.