If you have an iPod, you know how great it can be to carry your music with you. These days, even the smallest, cheapest iPods can hold huge amounts of music, and you can use iTunes to download music fairly cheaply. One thing that you can’t do with iTunes and your iPod, though, is to move your iPod from computer to computer or transfer your music backwards: from your iPod to a computer.
This may not always seem like a big issue. After all, you can simply download music to your computer and then transfer it to your iPod. Maybe you can’t think of situations right now in which you might want to do the opposite, but there are such situations. First off, you may want to do this if, for instance, your computer gets a virus and you have to wipe all your music and software off; when you reinstall iTunes and synch your iPod, you’d normally lose all your music and have to download it all over again.
With some software, though, you can actually transfer music from iPod to computer. Since your iPod is generally safer from file loss and viruses than your computer is, you can back up your music on your iPod, storing it all there for safe keeping. If the worst happens and you lose the music files that your computer had been holding, you can easily transfer the music that your iPod is still holding back to your computer, where you can rebuild your iTunes library with no trouble whatsoever.
Being able to move your music in this way also allows you to move playlists that you create on your iPod to iTunes, and it allows you to share music between computers much more easily, which is something that you can’t actually do with normal iTunes software.