Whoever left me this negative reputation to my above post can you please explain yourself?
Just for the record, it wasn't me... I was actually going to apologise for the probably a little bit too snappy comment. I do realise that not everyone knows of the search option (or thinks to use it); I was more trying to point out that it was there... Not just to cut down on bandwidth, but to suggest that the original poster would've found the answer to their question much more quickly by searching for a previous thread than by starting a new one and waiting for a reply.
That said, I'm not clear if you ever actually got a response for your original question -- if not,
Senuti is the tool that I use for moving songs off my iPod.
As for displaying hidden files,
TinkerTool will allow you to see these inside the Finder. I recommend turning that option off when you're done however, not just because you can do some damage with it, but mostly because the finder gets really cluttered with all those .dot files...