
That puts your collection on its iCloud storage and makes it accessible from iTunes and many iOS devices - in part by replacing song files you didn't get at the iTunes Store with free copies from there, leaving fewer files to upload. One way to avoid this holdup in the future is to sign up for Apple's $24.99/year iTunes Match. If you have enough data on your phone or tablet, you may also have to wait a few minutes for one of these apps to scan its contents. If you've upgraded your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to iOS 7 and you want to recover songs on it to a computer it's never synced with, you'll also have to tap through an iOS dialog asking if you should trust that computer with your device.


But their free-trial modes are more limited. Each can recover music stranded on an iOS device in addition to getting such data as text messages into your computer.

If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch (as opposed to a plain old, non-iOS iPod), you can also consider two general-purpose iOS backup tools: Ecamm Network's Mac-only, $29.95 PhoneView and Wide Angle Software's TouchCopy, $29.99 for Windows or Mac. But its own free-trial download copied some 260 songs off the iPad to a ThinkPad laptop running Windows 8.1 without math meltdowns. In Windows, the $19.99 CopyTrans suffers from a cluttered installation process - its developers have one installer download for eight different utilities that cover such unrelated tasks as photo transfer and iTunes backup - and its interface is a lot less tidy.
