iPhones, iPods, and iPads forum: Mac was stolen - now I've lost my music - HELP!!

I bought a Macbook Pro last year, and have recently had the pleasure of it being taken from me. I am no longer in a position to spend another $1500 on a new one, and ended up just buying a cheap PC for $300. I never really used the Mac to it's potential, I only email, browse the net and watch movies - don't know really why i spent that much on the first place, but oh well.

Now i have a huge problem. I had collected CD's for years and had hundreds of albums. I got so aggravated with storing, cleaning and organizing them, that i bought a 160GB Ipod Classic at the same time as the computer and put them all on there. Sold the discs for quite a lot of money surprisingly, and was very happy with less clutter and instant playability of my music anywhere - Welcome to the 21'st century I know!

Now, when i connect the Ipod to my new computer it asks me to format to windows and says i will lose all of my files!! I have searched Google and got results for retrieving the files, but mine are all in Mac format and can not be read by windows!

How am i going to be able to recover my music? The thought of losing all that money makes me sick. Does anyone have a way to help me? Am i just going to have to find someone with a Mac to extract them for me? Once they are extracted, can they be transferred to a PC?

I guess this is one of the drawbacks of the digital age! Good job i didn't do the same with all of my old photo's!

Thanks in advance for any input