While ITunes as an application makes it easy to move music from your computer to your iPod or iPhone, Apple has made it intentionally difficult to move the other way back.

There are many reasons why you may wish to copy the contents of your iPhone across to your PC. I recently installed Windows 7 on my main machine and am now facing the possibility of having my music collection wiped and restarting from fresh. This is a daunting task as I always keep my music library as tidy as possible so that I can locate and play my music quickly and easily.

Thankfully, there are many third party products out there that can back up your music collection straight from your iPod/iPhone to your PC. I ended up using SharePod because it was simple to use, uncomplicated and best of all FREE.

In order to back up all or selected songs, follow the steps below:

Step 1

Download the application from here: http://www.getsharepod.com/download/

Click on Download and save the application into a folder on your machine. Extract the contents into a folder.

Step 2

Plug in your iPhone via USB and double click on SharePod.exe to start the application.

Note: If you do not have your IPhone connected to the machine when you start SharePod, you will get a dialog box as below:

In this case, hit OK to exit the application, plug your IPhone in and restart the application.

Step 3

When the application starts, it will scan your IPhone and display all the songs on it.

Step 4

Select the songs you want to back up (Select all songs if you want to back up all the songs) and click on Copy to PC on the main toolbar. You will get a dialog box as below:

If you want to import the music automatically into ITunes as well, then ensure the “Import my music to ITunes” is checked. However, if you do that, ENSURE ITUNES IS NOT RUNNING.

The dialog box is divided into two sections. The top section has a browse location as to where the tracks will be saved. The bottom section has 4 presets as to how SharePod will name the track files. The last option on the bottom right is if you are not happy with the presets and want to do some custom naming.

Step 5

Once you are happy with your selection, hit OK and the copy will begin immediately.

Once all the tracks have completed copying, you can find them on your machine. The copy process can take a while if you have selected a lot of songs. For the example below, I selected only a few to show the process.

If you have selected to import the songs into your ITunes, you can also find them there too:

That’s pretty much how to copy individual songs onto your PC. If you select Backup iPod, it will back up all your songs as well as your Playlists to your PC and/or ITunes.

SharePod has an excellent site that details more instructions on getting the best out of the application as well as a comprehensive help and forum section. You can do a lot more with this application including exporting photos and copying tracks back into the IPod. However, my needs were just to move my ITunes library from my Vista machine to my new Windows 7 machine and for this task, it was excellent!

I would recommend this product to anyone who needs a simple copying application that is free to use. It hasn’t got the frills of some of the commercial applications out there, but serves its purpose well.

In addition to the application itself, SharePod also has a .Net library that is available to all developers who wishes to use it as a wrapper to create their own applications. I’ve already downloaded SharePodLib and am looking forward to seeing what I can do with it!