Being able to copy songs from an iPod to a Mac is incredibly useful, and no, we’re not talking about pirating tracks here. If you keep distinct iTunes libraries on more than one Mac, your iPod can carry them back and forth. If your hard drive crashes, or you get a new Mac, restoring iTunes tracks via an iPod is a great trick to have at your disposal.
But since the laws of DRM seem to be “guilty until proven just-a-friendly-customer-with-rights,” iTunes has never had this superpower built in. The only songs you can transfer iPod-to-iTunes are purchased tracks from the iTunes Store. Senuti (it’s iTunes spelled backward) has been around for years as an open-source project, but is now sold as $18 shareware, no longer under the GPL license, beginning with version 0.50.3. We’re cool with this—good, stable software is worth paying for. In Senuti’s case, FadingRed puts effort into updates and support, and plenty of free alternatives exist, so you can do some comparisons during Senuti’s 30-day trial.
You can drag not only songs and videos, but whole playlists, right to your iTunes library.
Senuti supports the iPod touch and iPhone, as well as all the iPods. When you connect your device, its library and playlists appear at the top of the sidebar, while your iTunes library and playlists are listed on the bottom. Blue dots next to the tracks show you which songs on your iPod already exist in iTunes, and you can hide them (View > Hide Songs > In iTunes). Drag songs from your iPod’s library and drop them onto your iTunes library, or select songs and click the big green Transfer button. Senuti can copy the songs anywhere on your hard drive for you to back up, or it can even add the songs directly to iTunes—just choose iTunes Music Folder as the default download location in Senuti > Preferences, as instructed in the manual. We had no problems with duplicate files being generated, and transfers went off without a hitch.
Senuti can also rebuild playlists from your iPod in iTunes, which worked as advertised. Smart playlists on your iPod become regular playlists in iTunes, which preserves the list as it was on your iPod, without adding in more qualifying songs from your iTunes library, as a smart playlist would. To copy a playlist to iTunes, you drag the whole playlist name from the iPod area of the sidebar and drop it on top of the word iTunes in the bottom half of the sidebar. A progress bar appears in the lower-left, and transfers were incredibly speedy on our 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM.
The app includes options to add songs to a particular playlist each time, to copy metadata like Play Count and Ratings, to compare songs based on an exact match or just certain criteria, and a complete array of file-handling options: If Senuti is told to transfer a song already on your computer, it can skip it, rename the new file, overwrite the old file, or ask you every time.
What Senuti can’t do is copy anything but music or videos—so no apps, photos, or other data. It can copy songs and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, although if they have DRM—that is, if they’re older music tracks purchased before the iTunes Store gave up DRM for music—you’ll still have to authorize any computer you want to play them on, and Apple limits this to 5.
Senuti is quick, stable, attractive, and easy to use—though no longer free, as in beer. Since we’ve been enjoying it for years already, we’re OK with that.
Clear interface. Drag-and-drop simplicity. Robust options in the Preferences. Speedy transfers of music and video.
No syncing for photos, applications, or other data.
