Federico Pistono

Apple makes very good produtcs, but it has the bad habit of making them closed source and limit their capabilities. Once again, the power of oss proves itself. With Senuti you can unlock your iPod, a simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer.

About Senuti

Senuti is a simple Mac OS X application for transferring songs from your iPod back to your computer.

There are many good reasons that someone would have to transfer music from her iPod back to her computer. There are many good ways to do it, too. Senuti is the only alternative that will give you the power and convenience that you need, wrapped in an interface that is extremely easy to use, at a cost that you can't complain about.

• Lightning fast -- There's a little file on your iPod called the iTunesDB file. What does that mean to you? Nothing. What does that mean to me? Everything. Every bit of information on every song on your iPod is stored in this little file. Every bit of information on your playlists is stored in this file, too. It's how iTunes knows what's on your iPod. It's how your iPod knows what's there, too. There isn't a much faster way to figure out what's on your iPod.
• Finding Songs -- Senuti includes all of the built in options that one would expect to find songs. You can search and sort in any combination of ways that you want. That's not quite enough sometimes, though. Sometimes you might want to know if you're copying the right song. Know how it goes, but don't know if that title is quite right? Play it! That's right, Senuti will play songs directly off of your iPod. It can even double as a jukebox player for your Shuffle or any other iPod.
• Playlists -- Senuti not only reads the playlists that you made on your iPod, but it allows you to transfer them back to your computer as well. A simple drag and drop action within the application will not only copy songs to your computer and and add them to iTunes, but it will make a new playlist with the same name and add all of the songs to that list.
• Seamless Integration -- Adding songs to your computer, you're probably going to add them to iTunes right after that, right? What if you didn't have to, wouldn't that be great? Well you don't have to. Senuti will do all of the work for you. What work you want it to do is up to you. You can have songs added to iTunes if you want. You can have all of your music organized into folders by artist and album, too. The option's yours.

How to use Senuti

1. Download Senuti. The latest version only works on Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. For OS X 10.3.9 users download Senuti 0.33 from the link at the bottom of the page.
2. Install Senuti. Drag the Seunti application to your Applications Folder. Drag Senuti into your dock or save a copy on your desktop if you wish. Eject the Senuti disk image and clear your download folder.
3. Make sure you have iTunes.
4. Open iTunes.
5. Plug your iPod into your computer.
6. Set your iPod to "Manually manage music and videos" in iTunes.
7. Open Senuti. Songs with a note or dot next to them are already in iTunes. However if you changed song information separately in your iTunes library or your iPod, it will think the same song is two different ones.
8. Go to "Preferences" and then "Copying" in Senuti. Choose the iTunes Music Folder as the "Save Location" for copied music. Otherwise two copies will be created of each song and will fill up hard drive space.
   
9. Highlight songs (hold down the Command key and click on them) and drag them to the text "iTunes". You can also drag and drop playlists from your iPod into "iTunes".

   

10. Make sure all the songs look normal and that there are no double copies.

Links

• Senuti Official page
• Senuti Project @ Google code
• Senuti Howto @ wikihow