A Look Inside the iPod Shuffle

I realize that we’ve already shown a dissection of the iPod Shuffle here at AppleMatters, but what I haven’t seen is a look inside the iPod Shuffle’s file structure. Let’s do it.

Taking my new 1GB iPod Shuffle, I stuck it into my 12-inch Powerbook and launched the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal). I then found my iPod Shuffle mounted on my Desktop and dragged it into the Terminal window. This gives me the path to the device:

$ /Volumes/CKSHUFFLE

If you hit enter here you’ll get an error:

-bash: /Volumes/CKSHUFFLE: is a directory

Instead of hitting enter, backspace to the beginning of the line and add a change directory command (cd):

$cd /Volumes/CKSHUFFLE/

This moves us inside the iPod Shuffle. Now simply type ‘ls’ at the command prompt to list all files. You will see a listing of any files you happen to have stored on your iPod Shuffle and an additional directory that is normally invisible in the Finder, called iPod_Control. Inside this directory are two more folders: one called “Music,” which holds all the music on your iPod Shuffle, and the other called “iTunes,” which holds a short list of preference files used by iTunes: DeviceInfo, iTunesControl, iTunesEQPresets, iTunesPlaylists, iTunesSD, iEKInfo, iTunesDB, iTunesPState, and iTunesPrefs.

If we want to go to the iPod_Control directory straight off the bat, simply type the following at the command line:

$cd /Volumes/[your iPod Shuffle’s name]/iPod_Control/

Once you are here, you can successfully copy songs off of your iPod Shuffle and back to your computer, just in case you accidentally erased a favorite song from your iTunes library and the only copy of the file happens to be on the iPod Shuffle. Type “cd Music” to jump inside the Music folder. Type “ls” and a list will be displayed of various folders (F00, F01, F02, for example) into which your music is divided. For example, directory F00 inside my iPod Shuffle’s Music folder contains the following files (among 45 total tracks):

• 01 Annihilation.m4p
• 07 People Are People.m4p
• 01 Now Get Busy.m4a
• 08 Freedom of Choice.m4p
• 01 The Future.m4p 08 Howlin_ Wolf.m4p
• 02 Champagne and Reefer.m4p
• 09 Bailey_s Walk.m4p
• 02 Imagine.m4p
• 09 Believe Me Natalie.m4p
• 02 Just Tonight.m4p
• 09 Days of Our Lives.m4p
• 03 Peace Love and Understan.m4p 09 Garden.m4p

Suppose you had navigated to F00 by using “cd Music/F00/” and used “ls” to list the files above. Among them, suppose you spotted a single song you wanted. If you wanted to copy 07 People Are People.m4p to your desktop, you would type the following at the command line:

$cp /Volumes/[your iPod Shuffle’s name]/iPod_Control/Music/F00/07 People Are People.m4p ~/Desktop/

If you, like me, have more than a Gig of free space available on your Mac and don’t feel like searching through all the different folders via the command line, you can simply copy the entire Music folder to your Desktop with the following commands:

$cd /Volumes/[your iPod Shuffle’s name]/iPod_Control/
$cp -R Music ~/Desktop/

This will create an identical Music folder to the one on your iPod Shuffle on your Desktop, complete with all your Shuffle’s songs, only visible in the Finder for a change.

This is also the same type of procedure you would use for fishing songs off of your regular iPod / iPod mini. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to figure out how to write a script that will use these commands to auto-fill my iPod Shuffle from my regular iPod...