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Melodeath

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 9, 2009
580
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Ok so Ive never put any music on my iPhone before. I always just used an iPod or listened to stuff in my dropbox from the dropbox app.

Now i have some stuff I want to put on the phone bc my dropbox is full. I have an iPhone 4S. I tried dragging the mp3s i wanted to the iPhone in iTunes and nothing happened. After a quick google search, i find I need to checkmark the box "manually manage music and videos". Ok - makes sense.

So i check that box, hit apply, and iTunes says something along the lines of "this iPhone was previously synched with another library. To manually manage music you'll need to click 'erase and synch' which will delete all content on your phone"

Firstly, this is the only computer my iPhone 4S has ever plugged into, so im not sure why its thinking otherwise.

Secondly, it's going to delete all my notes, pictures, contacts, texts, etc. just so i can put 10 mp3s manually on the device? I dont get it. How can i put music on my iPhone without deleting my content? Theres currently no music or video on my iphone (other than video in my camera roll). Is the wording of the message more ominous than it actually is, and it means it will only delee all music/videos currently on the device?

Pretty nerve-racking experience just to put a few songs on this phone

Thanks for any info you can offer
 
No, don't worry, it won't delete any notes or anything. It's just a pre-cautionary warning, although it you did have music it would delete it.

Go ahead and click erase. After the settings have been applied you can grab an MP3 file and drag it over the iPhone in iTunes, you'll get a blue selection/indicator rectangle as you hover the file over the iPhone icon, let it go.

That's it.

You could also sync music, as in let iTunes manage the music store on your computer and sync with the iPhone.

Though I personally prefer to manually manage music and videos, much more "Windows-y" just drag and drop things.
 
I'm always wary of sync because I'm scared I'm going to accidentally delete something from the phone, and then ti will delete it from the computer, which is not something I would ever want.

So the only thing it will delete is anything thats in the Music on the iPhone? What a scary, vague warning it gave haha
 
just a heads up

I tried doing the manual music thing but then I found a bug in the music app

Once you drop a song onto the phone if you want to change the song info from itunes it will not update on the phone.

So for me it was easier just to do the syncing if i want to fix or add any song info.
 
But you could delete it from the phone, then drag it again, no?

The idea is to be able to change the info of songs on the iphone. But since that doesn't work. one would have to first add the songs to the itunes library, make the info changes you want. then drag them to the phone. Extra steps that end up taking longer than just syncing
 
Makes sense. Again I've never had any music on my phone, so I've never first-hand experienced the need to edit song info once it was already on there.

Maybe setting up a special playlist in iTunes and just synching that with the phone would be the fastest way. If you only synch a playlist, you can't actually have any songs erased from your computer, correct?
 
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