igadget
about the same time i reformated my server at home to install linux, the portable hard drive that had all of my music on it died. actually, i tripped over the cable and sent it crashing to the floor. oops.
i thought i was going to have to rescan in all of my CDs, which just didn’t sound like fun. since all of my songs were still on my ipod (luckily, since i had to reformat that a few weeks ago, too), i knew there had to be an easy way to pull the files off the ipod back to my computer. as you may (or may not) know, the ipod file system isn’t exactly intuitive.
enter igadget. it actually does a lot of things, but it provides some useful tools to grab playlists and songs from the ipod and puts them in a nice, intelligent format back on the PC. you can select by playlist, artist, song, whatever. very, very handy.