MP3 players forum: Need help understanding mp3 players.

nothing venture nothing gain.

You can use a file browser to recover song files from those devices. Believe you can do the same with Cowon, Creative, Samsung as well.

Recovering files off an iPod in the past has been easy for me, though I admit I haven't done it in a while.

I recall that Apple does rename all the song files on the player to some nondescript gibberish, but you can still copy everything off the device using a simple file browser like File Explorer and then let iTunes to all the rest of the heavy lifting. Just connect an iPod to your computer as a USB device, then use the file manager of your choice to find the hidden folder that contains all the songs. Copy all the contents of the folder into a temp folder in your intended music directory on the computer. Disconnect the iPod once that's done and start iTunes. Then tell your freshly installed version of iTunes to add all the songs in that temp folder into the iTunes library. iTunes then will use the metadata embedded in the songs and recreate all the artist folders/album subfolders, rename the songs to match whatever setting you have for song names and place the files in the correct folders. All you have to do is kick back and let iTunes do its thing. Overnight always worked best for me. Minimal fuss for me, and usually ZERO editing and organizing.

I've done this a number of times on my various computers I've had at work, where I decided to use iTunes on the PC rather than my iPod to listen with, either through speakers or the cheap headset I leave there. Then I don't have to remember every morning about bringing my iPod along.