Restoring music from iOS5. iTunes Match?

[SamG2020]

A friend of mine is in the problematic situation where the laptop containing her iTunes library has kicked the bucket. Or more specifically, it was brutally murdered by a virus, with no anti-virus software on the poor Windows 7 machine to protect it. Hard drive recovery has unfortunately not worked.

Naturally, there was no backup. Though she does have an iPad, containing everything she wants.

I've tried searching for solutions to restoring her library from the iPad, however nothing has really stuck out as a simple solution. The laptop has yet to be replaced, but I'm trying to figure out what needs to be done ready for when the new one arrives.

I've seen some utilities which can copy the files off of iPods, but many of them seem to be a few years old and I'm not sure if they'd work with an iPad.

Ideally though, I think enabling the backup to iCloud option on the iPad and then using iTunes Match to upload will get around the problem. What I'm hoping is that the new laptop could be setup with iCloud and Match could be used to reclaim the music. Except as I don't have an iPad to test this with I don't know if this will work. Can an iPad upload to iTunes match, or is the laptop required to do this?

Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you

 

[Julien]

...Ideally though, I think enabling the backup to iCloud option on the iPad and then using iTunes Match to upload will get around the problem. What I'm hoping is that the new laptop could be setup with iCloud and Match could be used to reclaim the music. Except as I don't have an iPad to test this with I don't know if this will work. Can an iPad upload to iTunes match, or is the laptop required to do this?

Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you

Don't believe Music Match will scan/match your iPad music library. Feel fairly certain that MM only scans/matches your main iTunes library.

 

[PNutts]

If redownloading purchases and re-ripping from CDs isn't an option, I've seen people in the forum discuss this issue. IIRC, plug the iPad into the new iTunes and don't sync and erase the iPad. Back up the iPad in iTunes. Then let iTunes zap the iPad to use it, and then restore from the backup.

It's late and I hope I remembered that correctly. If nothing else it may give you a more targeted search for what to do.

 

[Arelunde]

I hope you're right. This happened to me several years ago (pre-iPhone days) - computer died suddenly, taking all my iTunes music with it. Could never figure out how to get the music off my iPods, back to the computer.

The only thing that saved me was my then-BlackBerry had a desktop application that imported my iTunes music to the BB, and also to my computer independent of iTunes.

 

[Chargerdan]

Try using CopyTrans. It will allow you to copy the music files from the iPad into the computer without directly using iTunes.