Ever since podServe began I've been using a great program called XPlay, now in its third incarnation. There have been so many times when this piece of software has got me (and our clients) out of a tight spot. Here's a typical case study.
Client has three iPods, a USB hard drive and a new computer replacing the machine that previously housed his music library. The old PC was damaged beyond recovery so the task we were given was to reconstruct one complete music library from four locations. The procedure is pretty simple, you just recover the music from each iPod, merge it with what's on the drive and then do some housekeeping to remove duplicates.
So each iPod was connected in turn to one of our Windows machines that runs XPlay 3, and it dutifully recovered two of the three iPods. Unfortunately it struggled with the third. XPlay recognised the iPod and opened it, but refused to display the contents of the music folder. We were able to update the iPod's firmware (an XPLay function), ran standard Windows disk checking functions, but all to no avail. Music stays stuck on iPod which by bad fortune holds more music than any of the other units.
What could be done? Nothing to be lost by trying to recover the music on one of our Macs. I didn't have much hope and was mentally planning my "Oops sorry" speech to my client. XPlay is Windows only, the equivalent software we have on Mac is called Senuti (yes, that's iTunes backwards). I was immensely relieved to find Senuti quickly grabbed the iPod and promptly started to download the music from iPod to the Apple hard drive.
I was so pleased to have achieved the recovery we needed I was more than happy to overlook the slowness of Senuti compared with XPlay. So while I remain an XPlay fan I'm finding Senuti is quickly winning a place in my heart.
Showing posts with label senuti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label senuti. Show all posts
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Senuti - I Used It
Panic phone call from a client - he has a Mac with his music on an external hard drive. With impending dinner party the hard disk failed and he's concerned that he won't be able to pump music around the house using Airport Express. Mrs Client not happy about silence and looming dinner disaster. We talk about plugging his iPod directly into one of the Airport Express units as an emergency fix, that's a possibility but he wants me to make a house call to get music off iPod onto a new drive.
Normally the way we'd handle this is for the iPod to come back here where I'd connect it to one of the PCs and use XPlay to recover the music. I've spoken about XPlay many times before and think its a great product for this type of work. However time is against us so the music has to be recovered at clients home and since my PCs are all desktops that means either using my MacBook or his Mac. Either way I can't use XPlay as that's Windows only.
After a bit of Googling I saw Senuti (groaned to learn thats iTunes backwards) which is Apple OS X based software intended to let you recover music from an iPod back to your Mac. And its free, always a bonus. So when I arrived amidst the stricken music scene I set up Senuti, opened iTunes and crossed my fingers. As you connect the iPod you have to hold down the two keys next to the space bar (cmd,option) which intercepts the normal iPod sync process and lets you select disk mode. Once this is done the iPod is accessible from Senuti.
I was impressed. Senuti checks the contents of the iPod against iTunes and highlights what's on the iPod and not on the hard drive. In our case that was the entire iTunes library, so I selected all the tracks and hit the green arrow in the top left of the Senuti screen and waited. About 30 minutes later the tracks had been copied off the iPod onto the new hard drive. While this was being done I'd read that I could have set Senuti to add the tracks directly back into the iTunes library but I hadn't done that so I had to spend a few minutes reloading the library into iTunes, no great hardship.
Best of all one happy client and very happy Mrs Client. History doesn't recall if the meal was a triumph, I'm sure it was, but I was certainly cooking with Senuti.
Normally the way we'd handle this is for the iPod to come back here where I'd connect it to one of the PCs and use XPlay to recover the music. I've spoken about XPlay many times before and think its a great product for this type of work. However time is against us so the music has to be recovered at clients home and since my PCs are all desktops that means either using my MacBook or his Mac. Either way I can't use XPlay as that's Windows only.
After a bit of Googling I saw Senuti (groaned to learn thats iTunes backwards) which is Apple OS X based software intended to let you recover music from an iPod back to your Mac. And its free, always a bonus. So when I arrived amidst the stricken music scene I set up Senuti, opened iTunes and crossed my fingers. As you connect the iPod you have to hold down the two keys next to the space bar (cmd,option) which intercepts the normal iPod sync process and lets you select disk mode. Once this is done the iPod is accessible from Senuti.
I was impressed. Senuti checks the contents of the iPod against iTunes and highlights what's on the iPod and not on the hard drive. In our case that was the entire iTunes library, so I selected all the tracks and hit the green arrow in the top left of the Senuti screen and waited. About 30 minutes later the tracks had been copied off the iPod onto the new hard drive. While this was being done I'd read that I could have set Senuti to add the tracks directly back into the iTunes library but I hadn't done that so I had to spend a few minutes reloading the library into iTunes, no great hardship.
Best of all one happy client and very happy Mrs Client. History doesn't recall if the meal was a triumph, I'm sure it was, but I was certainly cooking with Senuti.
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