PunkFloyd, King of Bards wrote:
You don't need any special software to move music files from an iPod to your Windows computer.
If you don't care about the obfuscated file names, you can just copy them out with Windows explorer (i.e. "My Computer"). The iPod is mounted to the system as a regular external hard drive and it doesn't take too much hunting to find the files. Some of the directories are marked as hidden so you'll need to configure explorer to show hidden files if necessary. (Alt+T -> Folder options -> View tab -> Show hidden files, folders, and drives). On my olde iPod the music files are in the iPod_Control\Music\F00,F01,F02,... directories.
There is a way to get around the obfuscated file names as well if you're looking for a specific song/album/artist/etc. Change the file view mode to "Details" and then enable columns for artist/album/title etc. (Right-click one of the column headers -> Select "More..." and then check the relevant details to display.) Windows will then pull out the appropriate information from the MP3 tag and display it in the column. You can then sort on the column to easily find what you're looking for.
Note that you can't go in the other direction. You can't just drop an MP3 into one of the directories and expect it to be available for playback.
Suck on it Apple.
You could probably bang out some sort of script that renames the files based on ID3 tags.
Of course, if you wanted to do this you probably wouldn't be asking about retrieving mp3s from an iPod in the first place.