Last weekend the Western Digital MyBook that I keep my iTunes library on died a horrid death leaving me high and dry. The unfortunate part was only a portion of my library was backed up to another drive. If I couldn’t find a way to recover my files I’d lose over $200 worth of music. Luckily I still had my iPod with most of my library intact but how could I get my music off? You can’t even seen your iPod’s file structure most of the time. Enter iLinkPod.

iLinkPod (cost: FREE) is a Mac program that allows you to view the hidden files on your iPod and even copies them off to your local hard drive. Once you’ve copied them off you’ll notice iTunes has assigned them odd names like “khzop.m4a” or “vhzym.mp3″. To recover your song name you can use another great utility called MP3-CMM.

MP3-CMM (cost: FREE) allows you to view the ID3 tags of your songs by using the Get Info function on your finder. Another program named Dukko (cost: nagware) will do the renaming for you but it doesn’t work with m4a files. You’ll have to rename those by hand.

Using this method I was able to recover 98% of my library just by what was still on my iPod. iLinkPod and MP3-CMM are both free but if you like them and use them consider making a contribution to the developers. Dukko has an annoying popup after every conversion that will nag you until you “donate” to get an unlock code. All these options are for Mac users only.