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iPhone SE (2016) How do I simply transfer music to my iPhone without using iTunes?

B

Baz88

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 12, 2019
6
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I hope someone out there can help me with this as it's been driving me crazy.

It's such a simple thing I want to do. I simply want to transfer a playlist of songs to my iPhone and be able to listen to them offline (not using iTunes at all)

HOW CAN I DO THIS????

I've tried everything. I've searched high and low on the internet and still found no solution.

I've tried lots of different 3rd party media players and most of them require you to connect the app to iTunes. I want to do this completely independent of iTunes. Or they will force you to use some cloud based service.

It doesn't have to be a fancy media player app or anything. Just a simple application that I can play songs through. Why is it so impossible????

I've even tried the VLC app on the iPhone but that didn't work and was supper non user friendly.

Please, please can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advanced.
 
You can't. BTW, what is so hard in making a play list in iTunes and after that sync it with your iPhone?
 
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Baz88 said:
I hope someone out there can help me with this as it's been driving me crazy.

It's such a simple thing I want to do. I simply want to transfer a playlist of songs to my iPhone and be able to listen to them offline (not using iTunes at all)

HOW CAN I DO THIS????

I've tried everything. I've searched high and low on the internet and still found no solution.

I've tried lots of different 3rd party media players and most of them require you to connect the app to iTunes. I want to do this completely independent of iTunes. Or they will force you to use some cloud based service.

It doesn't have to be a fancy media player app or anything. Just a simple application that I can play songs through. Why is it so impossible????

I've even tried the VLC app on the iPhone but that didn't work and was supper non user friendly.

Please, please can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advanced.
Click to expand...
I don't know whether you have tried this application and method.
If not, good luck.
 
bbrks said:
You can't. BTW, what is so hard in making a play list in iTunes and after that sync it with your iPhone?
Click to expand...

Nothing hard about that. But the reason I want to avoid iTunes is that the playlist contains hundreds of different artists and only about 1 - 2 songs for each artist.

So when I add these songs to a playlist in iTunes, it totally messes up my iTunes library by adding all the different artists in there.
 
This issue has been hashed over for years. The bottom line is that if you have your own music collection, or maybe a friend of yours want to share mp3s with you, and you don’t have a computer or you don’t have a computer that runs iTunes, then you’re out of luck - at least if you want to use the native Music app in iOS.
 
It's easy to do. First you need to dig into your iTunes source folder on your Mac to find the actual .aac (or whatever the extension is nowadays) music file. Make a copy of that musc file to another folder on your desktop along with all the other music files you want copied to your iPhone.

Then use a iPhone app like "File Browser" to log into your Mac (you'll need to turn on sharing on your Mac) and copy that folder over to your iPhone. There are a few apps that can play local stored music files on the iPhone (Goodreader is just one of them).

The goal is to stay the hell away from iTunes and the Music app on your iPhone. Both of those atrocities are designed to trap you and limit your freedom. When it comes to music on the iPhone, Apple isn't your friend. They're more like a drug dealer than a helping hand.
 
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Do what I did to get away from the abysmal mess that is itunes....got a Galaxy s9 ! Easy peasy now.
 
God damn. I know music app is such a bad thing to start with, but the negativity here. :O

Anyway. Another app choice is nPlayer. It can play all kinds of videos and music as well. File manager style library management. Supports most audio format. It is slightly pricey but worth every penny.

As for Apple Music or Spotify, the main issue is not all songs (and never will be) are available and expired license agreement can cause problems when trying to listen to the music. All streaming services are only good for content discovery, period.

As for the iTunes, while I don’t necessarily enjoy using it, I cannot move away from iTunes because of a massive library (400GB with 4000 songs) and music app integration with iOS is still the best, undoubtedly.
 
Jeeez so much misinformation and handwringing. Syncing and even manual music management will be done with the finder and the Music app will do everything music related that iTunes does now. Shouting at a wall I guess.
 
decafjava said:
Jeeez so much misinformation and handwringing. Syncing and even manual music management will be done with the finder and the Music app will do everything music related that iTunes does now. Shouting at a wall I guess.
Click to expand...
But before claiming that, many people cannot upgrade to Catalina because 1) critical app still 32-bit and never have a chance to receive an upgrade. 2) Mac is not supported. 3) want a certain feature unavailable in Catalina (*cough*Dashboard*cough*) 4) any other less common reason.
Just because tech world embraces upgrade all the time, does not mean general public either care about upgrade or want to upgrade. There are people out thinking updating watchOS is a complicated process. Go figure.
 
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Shirasaki said:
But before claiming that, many people cannot upgrade to Catalina because 1) critical app still 32-bit and never have a chance to receive an upgrade. 2) Mac is not supported. 3) want a certain feature unavailable in Catalina (*cough*Dashboard*cough*) 4) any other less common reason.
Just because tech world embraces upgrade all the time, does not mean general public either care about upgrade or want to upgrade. There are people out thinking updating watchOS is a complicated process. Go figure.
Click to expand...
Good points all...I'm a bit worried about the 32-bit app thing.
 
I don’t want to use iTunes because I’m moving over from Android and have a stack of music in FLAC format and iTunes won’t play it.

Maybe use something like Foobar? Or does anyone have a better suggestion?
 
filbert42 said:
I don’t want to use iTunes because I’m moving over from Android and have a stack of music in FLAC format and iTunes won’t play it.

Maybe use something like Foobar? Or does anyone have a better suggestion?
Click to expand...
I use XLD to deal with the huge stockpile of FLAC files I Have. It has a very neat feature that allows me to add converted songs straight into iTunes library automatically.
For the music app, nPlayer is a nice alternative. It is a bit pricey but well worth it, even if the main purpose is to play video on your device.
 
I don't think you can without Apple Music. You can create playlists on your iTunes and have Apple Music sync it across the system. I've been doing that.
 
I have been using MediaMonkey (it is only available for Windows though) for years now with my 600+ song collection and it works great. I can sync songs and playlists without ever touching itunes and you can still use the native ios music app. I only use itunes to backup and update my iphone.
 
Thanks for all the responses. I don't want to convert to another format, too much space needed.
Anyway, I've decided to go with foobar2000 and, for rsyncing, TuneFUSION (which costs £15 after the trial period, but I don't mind paying for useful tools). So far, it's working well. I haven't worked out how to get foobar to show all the classical music tags I use (composition, for example) but the sync seems to work well.
 
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