save audio collection from Apple, move collection off iPod into a form useable elsewhere Options

[AndyH-ha]

Is there any software that can rescue audio material on an iPod from Apple? Start with a largish collection of audiobooks (about 35GB) that has been put on the iPod gradually, via iTunes, without much thought to a non-apple future. More that a few of these books have hundreds of individual files. Probably none are DRM entangled. All are mp3 format. As far as I know at the moment, there is nothing wrong with the iPod data, except that it is only usefull if one wants iPod.

The goal is to move this material onto a computer, then onto a non-apple player, in a form controllable by the user, not based on some database that is not directly accessible and changeable as desired.

It is easy to directly offload everything onto a computer hard disk, but not easy to tell what one has. What reading I've done considered ways to get iTunes and the iPod into harmony, whether to recover from hardware failures or to just make the computer database and the iPod material fully agree with each other. There was no consideration of getting it away from iTunes and iPod.

Of course the ideal thing would have been to keep a pre-iTunes backup of everything so the difficulty would never arise, but hindsight is so easy and so non-functional.

[AndyH-ha]

"Then add the folder where all the songs are" The files occupy fifty folders on the iPod. Does this mean they should be consolidate into one folder on the hard drive to start this process?

Is "open a clean iTunes library" an iTunes option?

Does "they will be copied neatly to the iTunes media folder" mean that the 30 some GB of data will be duplicated, or does this just involve some kind of pointers being created?

I've looked at some tags with mp3tag and with foobar2000. Most have "album name" which is most often the book title, but some do not. I can't tell what these ones are. Also, for some there seems to be no tag information that mp3tag recognizes, but sometimes foobar2000 does show something for those, which suggests they are using different kinds of tags. Still others show incomplete information in both programs.

Is this likely to cause iTunes to fail on the entire project, or just for those files it can't identify?

Since the files I can't identify are on the iPod, and have the same kind of file name as all the others (wxyz.mp3), they must have had tags that iTunes can utilize, no?

Assuming I can get it to work, will I end up with files I can immediately place on a non-apple, non-iTunes related device, or just a more tidy set for an iPod?