View iPod Nano songs without iTunes, C# Express, Part 1

In this post, I'll give some background information on what this project is about.

After receiving an iPod Nano from my wife, and downloading all the songs from my desktop to it, I was a bit perturbed to find out that even though a majority of my songs were in non-protected mp3 format, I could find no easy way to listen or port these songs to another computer that did not also have iTunes installed on it. I thought perhaps I could just look at the songs on the iPod itself and physically copy them, but alas, the song names are scrambled in some weirdo XXXX.mp3 format and not organized in any readable fashion. In researching this issue, I found that another person had also come across this issue and wrote a program in VB6 that can view and extract the songs on the iPod. This program is called SharePod and the source code is free.

Although SharePod works great, its written in VB6, and the code is a bit hard on developers. There are no comments, and little OO structure. I decided that a fun project would be to write a similar (albeit slightly trimmed) application in C#, that does basically the same thing. In doing so I would learn quite a bit about the iTunesDB file, which is the core iPod music database file. Yes, I know, there are likely others out there that have done the same thing, but doing it yourself is part of the fun isn't it?

In the next post, I'll discuss the application goals.