Here's a problem most of us will run into one of these days. Our computer will crash, and unless we had a backup (yeah right!), we'll lose all of our music files.

The nice thing is if your files are on your multi-gig MP3 player, you can just put the files back on your newly rebuilt computer. While it's pretty easy to do with most MP3 players, it's a little more difficult to do with an iPod. Jake over at JakeLudington.com gives you some simple tips on getting iPod files back to your computer. He starts by suggesting some inexpensive software:

Rather than putting your entire song library in jeopardy, I suggest investing in an affordable software app for handling the audio file transfer. A quick search of any major download site will turn up literally dozens of apps designed for this purpose. The one I'm recommending is iPod Access, which works for both Windows and Mac OS X users. iPod Access is $14.99 for Windows or $12.99 for OS X.

One of the main reasons I recommend iPod Access over any of the other software solutions is because it seems to have the most complete set of features. Using iPod Access to backup the library on your iPod to a computer provides a ton of features you might expect from a more traditional full hard disk backup solution. The software tracks changes, incrementally backing up tracks as you add them to the iPod. It interfaces directly with the iPod song database, providing all the Album and Artist information. It clones the playlists you created on the iPod, so you won't even need to start from scratch on playlisting. It can even recover songs from iPods with a damaged database in most cases.

Read Copy Songs From iPod to Windows