Transferring 35gb of music from ipod to laptop

Hey everyone,
A few months ago I transferred 35gb of music from a portable hard drive to my laptop (running Vista) and sent it to the predefined "Music" folder. Shortly thereafter my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. I still want this music (which is now saved on my ipod). How can I best transfer this over to my laptop? Should I not put it in the Music folder? Will moving it over in smaller amounts over time fix this problem? Should I place a few GB's in different areas rather than clumping it all together? I am running Windows Vista with a 200gb hard drive on a laptop.

Thanks,
Hiji

Take this with a grain of salt.

I have a 5th gen video iPod, 60gb model. I absolutely loathe Apple software and their interfaces, both OS and device alike, and I think iTunes is a pig and not worth my time. Unfortunately at the time the iPod was the only model that had that capacity at the time I bought my player, and my music collection clocked in at 40-something gig.

Did I mention I hate Apple software?

As such, I put Rockbox on my iPod as a "replacement" firmware, and manage my mp3s in file and directory/subfolder structure as I always have the past 10-odd years treating the iPod like an external HDD. Rockbox is wonderful in a number of ways; it doesn't force me to use stupid playlists or that horrible iTunes app to manage my music, it supports a large number of codecs above what the standard iPod firmware does including both FLAC and Ogg, you can customize the interface with a number of themes, etc etc etc. The main downside is that it can be slower to buffer and seek to music when navigating to the songs you want to play through the menus.

There's a nice free app out there called Allway Sync which I use to syncronize my music to my player. The "master" copy is on my hard drive, and whenever I update my collection I use that to do a one way "push" from my HDD to the player via the USB cable. You don't have to use the standard Windows "My Music" folder, you can do it however you want. I just have a directory on my external HDD called "MP3" that houses my stuff, as I said that's how I've done it for years. It will take you a few hours no matter how you do it, with Windows file explorer or iTunes, to copy your music back to your HDD, but there really isn't any better way so you'll just have to be patient.

For ripping my CDs, I simply use CDex, which has been a tried and true app that works great with a number of codecs. Works with FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, APE, you name it.

Tag management can be done easily with mp3tag, which is also free. The better but not free alternative would be Tag & Rename, which costs $30 for a license and a year's updates. Not really worth it IMO, however it IS superior to mp3tag in terms of features and control.

The above may sound a bit convoluted, but I can assure it's not once you get used to it. I've found that those programs are much easier to use than iTunes and give me far more control over how I encode and manage my music. It does require a little technical know-how, but once you figure it out you should be quite pleased with the results.

Just an option for you to consider, I strongly suggest you try it out if you feel so inclined.

:balloon2:

As for preventing loss of data, try this.

Install your Operating System on one partition of the hard drive (20gb for XP, 30 for Vista) and have your data on the other partition. This means if you need to, you can simply format the OS partition and keep your data.

edit: yes, that means putting it in something like D:\Files\Music as I do.