January 2, 2011

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I recently got both a Mac and stuck in New Jersey for a week. Since I hadn’t expected the latter, I was getting impatient about transferring my music (all 8 GB of it!) to my Mac so I could start syncing it to my iPhone.

While I’ve frequently seen the question asked in forums, I’d never really paid attention. How can you copy your music back to your computer from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod? Yes, the best way is still to have a backup and just copy it to the new computer. I had a backup – but it was on a network server that would have required days of high speed access to download – something I didn’t have where I was in NJ. I also had the netbook with the original music library with me – but no simple way of transferring said library from the netbook to the Mac.

So I started searching. On TiPb, I even found threads where I had recommended using a 3rd party app, but never suggesting any particular app. My search continued. I really didn’t want to shell out $30-40 for something that was probably only going to be used once. I also didn’t want to buy without trying, or get stuck with something that was going to mess up my iPhone. Of course, I also didn’t want something that hadn’t been updated recently.

After a lengthy research session, I came upon Senuti. It looked “acceptable” from what I could see on their website, and offered a trial, that for some people would take care of their entire music and video collection! Senuti’s trial gives you 30 days and 1,000 songs. That kind of generosity suggested that this was a developer who was totally confident in a product. The $18 price tag also seemed more than fair for something that accomplished what I wanted.

I downloaded the trial, and tried one song. It happened so quickly I almost missed it. Why can’t iTunes sync that quickly?! I played the song back on my Mac. Yup – sounded about right. So then I got braver and tried doing 5 songs at once. Very easy, very fast. I compared the size of the file now on my Mac with the original on my netbook – the same. I probably could have been satisfied just using the trial and only copying 1,000 songs. After all, it’s not like I was really going to need the 2,000+ in my collection before getting home. But I do believe in supporting the development community – and I’m basically impatient.

Five minutes and $18 later, my copy of Senuti was registered, and I was copying my entire collection from my iPhone to my Mac. I discovered an added benefit to transferring my music using this method that I would have missed had I simply waited and copied my entire library to an external drive, and then copied it back to the Mac: I would still have dozens of duplicates. Senuti took care of that for me, and I’m especially grateful. At first I was worried when I saw there were songs (mostly ringtones) missing the blue dot indicating it had been copied to the hard drive. But further investigation told me this was a good thing.

If Senuti copied photos, too, it would be the perfect media backup tool for an iOS device. Of course, I would love to be able to dump iTunes altogether, and this is a step in the right direction!

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