Can I restore iTunes from my iPod Touch?

Question

I recently lost my desktop to what I believe is a fried motherboard.  Of course when this happened it was totally unexpected, and there is not a recent backup of my iTunes library.  I have everything on my iPod still and was wondering if I could restore from that somehow?  Also, I have a laptop with most of the same music on (but not exactly the same)  Everything that was purchased was done so under one appleid.  What I am really worried about is all of the hours of music I had on the desktop from old CD's.  I still have the CD's but would love to avoid having to rip all of that music again.  Is there anyway to restore from an iPod, desktop hardrive or iCloud?  Also, if there is a way to merge libraries using an ipod that would be helpful.  i could merge the ipod onto the laptop and be good to go.  Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Copy the content of the smaller library into the Automatically add to iTunes folder of the larger one, then dedupe...
Apple's offical deduping adivce is here... HT2905 - How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library. It is a manual process and the article fails to explain some of the potential pitfalls.
Use Shift > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to display duplicates as this is normally a more useful selection. You need to manually select all but one of each group to remove. Sorting the list by Date Added may make it easier to select the appropriate tracks, however this works best when performed immediately after the dupes have been created.  If you have multiple entries in iTunes connected to the same file on the hard drive then don't send to the recycle bin. Use my DeDuper script if you're not sure, don't want to do it by hand, or want to preserve ratings, play counts and playlist membership. See thisthread for background and please take note of the warning to backup your library before deduping.
(If you don't see the menu bar press ALT to show it temporarily or CTRL+B to keep it displayed)
tt2