The Autofill feature for adding music to iPhones (available under the Music header of an iDevice within iTunes) seems to have changed significantly with iTunes 10.5 and iOS 5, for the worse, and in many cases it is quite broken.
In the past, the autofill feature could also be cancelled before it completed with no adverse effects. I always used this to quickly add songs to my iPhone. Then I would go back and delete songs I didn't want, and manually add songs I did want. I've always had music syncing turned off because my on-the-go musical whims vary wildly.
This has all changed with iOS 5 and iTunes 10.5. The Autofill feature now acts like a sync process. (In fact, for all intents it is -- if you cancel the Autofill and then sync the phone, it tries to restart the Autofill) If you cancel the autofill early, iTunes and the iPhone remain locked together -- greyed out songs that were not copied as part of the autofill show up on the iPhone. iTunes will not let you manually copy music over to the iPhone at this point. It will let you delete songs from the iPhone, but doing so often causes the Autofill process to continue again from its paused state. Changing the Autofill settings (allocated space, playlist used) has no effect at this point.
I don't know what Apple's reasoning was for radically altering how Autofill works, but you can no longer use it to quickly add songs. Worse, its new behaviour is full of bugs. The fact that there appears to be no way to completely cancel the Autofill process, once started, is a serious UI oversight, and a bad user experience.
I suppose the only workaround at this point is to create a Smart Playlist in shuffle mode, and manually copy over music to the iPhone. However, with this you lose the ability to cap how much music is used on the device. I've submitted feedback to Apple, but sadly I doubt they'll revert the behaviour of Autofill at this point.
In the past, the autofill feature could also be cancelled before it completed with no adverse effects. I always used this to quickly add songs to my iPhone. Then I would go back and delete songs I didn't want, and manually add songs I did want. I've always had music syncing turned off because my on-the-go musical whims vary wildly.
This has all changed with iOS 5 and iTunes 10.5. The Autofill feature now acts like a sync process. (In fact, for all intents it is -- if you cancel the Autofill and then sync the phone, it tries to restart the Autofill) If you cancel the autofill early, iTunes and the iPhone remain locked together -- greyed out songs that were not copied as part of the autofill show up on the iPhone. iTunes will not let you manually copy music over to the iPhone at this point. It will let you delete songs from the iPhone, but doing so often causes the Autofill process to continue again from its paused state. Changing the Autofill settings (allocated space, playlist used) has no effect at this point.
I don't know what Apple's reasoning was for radically altering how Autofill works, but you can no longer use it to quickly add songs. Worse, its new behaviour is full of bugs. The fact that there appears to be no way to completely cancel the Autofill process, once started, is a serious UI oversight, and a bad user experience.
I suppose the only workaround at this point is to create a Smart Playlist in shuffle mode, and manually copy over music to the iPhone. However, with this you lose the ability to cap how much music is used on the device. I've submitted feedback to Apple, but sadly I doubt they'll revert the behaviour of Autofill at this point.