Rescuing music files from dying iPod - one step beyond the usual problems.

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Hello Mac Community,

I've got something of a complex problem and hope someone here can help. A lot of it involves Mac DRM-related problems.

I have always backed up my very large collection of music on an external hard drive, in addition to keeping it on my 80 gig ipod. A few weeks ago the iPod started to die. And when I went to get onto my backup hard drive, it turned out that had totally died as well. The iPod was dying, the hardrive was dead, basically simultaneously.

So I then attempted to get the basic music out via the brute force method -- finding the hidden files and moving them to my only available storage mechanism after the hard drive died, my time capsule (acting in this case as simply a drive). Because of the already fragmenting drive, I had to rely on the sudo command via terminal (to not have the transfer stop after every corrupt file). It took a *long* time, but basically, everything moved over.

While all this was happening, I got a new laptop and now have a new iTunes library.

The problem now is that I've got a bunch of locked and unlicked ma4 files, and a bunch of burned music files that have four letter ID tags and no track names in the titles. A lot of the ma4 files wont transfer to my new laptops iTunes, and some of those that do seem to be stuck with the 4 letter id tags and nothing else. So it is quite frustrating. I rescued nearly 70 gigs of music but nearly all of it is now unplayable and it's impossible to know what it actually is. Anything I can do at this point?
 
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