So far I've only ripped enough of my CDs to fill up 75% of my iPod Mini. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Over the weekend I had a laptop meltdown. I have no idea what happened, but I do know I lost all of the tracks that were stored on that drive. Lucky for me, all of my songs were still on my iPod.
However, as far as i can tell, there's no way to say "synch from iPod" rather than "synch from local drive" in iTunes. So, what do you do? At first, i tried to just import my music folders back in; straight from my iPod (they're hidden, but all of the files are there). This worked in so far as I had all of my files, but i had lost my play count, ratings, etc (any metadata not stored directly in the file).
I decided to look for an iPod "ripper" and came across iPodRip. I downloaded the windows version, which isn't as fully featured as the Mac version, but all i needed to do was click the "Import All" button and about an hour later I had everything i wanted back on my laptop. Perhaps not ethical in Apple's view, but it sure is convenient for situations like this.
