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Why does copying songs to my iPhone have to be so complicated?
- Thread starter Krupke
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TheShadowXX: I haven’t tried Pwntunes. But I read that Pwntunes messes up the library database when iTunes on the computer tries to read it. Music2iPod did this and I had a heck of a time trying to fix that yesterday, when it left songs on the music app list that could not be deleted by iTunes or from the phone itself. If you can confirm that Pwntunes or Mewseek are fully compatible with iTunes, then I’ll be sure to check them out (as Bridge leaves something to be desired).
BumpyFlatline: Thanks, I’ll find out what Gremlin does.
Frenchjay "Or just authorise the computer to use with the device in the settings."
That was never an issue, as the iMac I’m using was always authorized with the same ID as the one that I previously used to transfer music and other files to the phone.
thelatinist: "If you wish to get your new music on your iPhone, then you simply have to put those songs into the iTunes library you originally synced with your phone. "
LOL.
That's funny. That's like "You can realize your dream of playing basketball with the Knicks. You simply have to make yourself three feet taller." I swear, I'm starting to get the impression that Steve Jobs was the original inspiration behind Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" episode. I so love it when people try to make these artificially difficult Apple tasks sound so "simple". As though its the most pleasant and natural thing on earth to find yourself shackled by all of Apple's "technical chains", when all you want to do is use your phone like God intended, and get on with your life. So what’s so “simple” about me having to travel 100 miles to run back to my apt. in order to pop a few songs on my iPhone that come from the computer I am presently in front of, then travel 100 miles back to where I was to listen to them, all because Apple refuses to let me interface with more than one computer?
No, sir. That's an inappropriate use of the word "simple". “Simple” is being able to use my phone as a disk drive and copy music like I would any file, as I can do on my Android device. And not have to worry about whether I am “logged in” to my music player, or whether I have the right difficult to find switches in the player turned on, or where my music comes from, or which “ID” is associated with which song, or spending hours and days figuring out why there are song titles that can not be deleted from your iTunes library or your iPhone… or any of all the other nonsense Apple makes you trudge through.
As I have now fully learned, there is absolutely nothing “simple” about transferring music to and from an iPhone. That said, being jailbroken has given me the chance to say eff you to iTunes. While the Bridge app mentioned is not the most elegant solution to me, at least it allows me to transfer music to the phone without the dictatorware that is Apple’s iTunes. Then, “Songbird” takes over quite nicely, when I want to play that music on the computer.
"Frankly, most of the time when people complain about it it's because it doesn't make it easy to "share" music libraries with others. But that is, of course, by design, since it prevents the iPod/iPhone from becoming an easy music piracy device."
This is not about sharing libraries with others, that's a different issue. This is about copying my own music from my own collection on my own computers on to my own iPhone. That should not be controversial, nor should it be artificially limited. Doing so is the very thing that drives people to piracy, since piracy is more convenient, less time consuming and less nerve-rattling than doing as the record companies demand. But I suspect that piracy is not a huge problem with the iPhone if the forums are any indication of that. So to make the majority suffer in frustration and curse Apple’s name is to shoot oneself in the foot. Not very wise, on their part, IYAM. Perhaps Apple customers suffered this for x many years because the competition wasn’t that strong. If more recent sales and stock figures are any indication, those days appear to be numbered.
BumpyFlatline: Thanks, I’ll find out what Gremlin does.
Frenchjay "Or just authorise the computer to use with the device in the settings."
That was never an issue, as the iMac I’m using was always authorized with the same ID as the one that I previously used to transfer music and other files to the phone.
thelatinist: "If you wish to get your new music on your iPhone, then you simply have to put those songs into the iTunes library you originally synced with your phone. "
LOL.
That's funny. That's like "You can realize your dream of playing basketball with the Knicks. You simply have to make yourself three feet taller." I swear, I'm starting to get the impression that Steve Jobs was the original inspiration behind Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" episode. I so love it when people try to make these artificially difficult Apple tasks sound so "simple". As though its the most pleasant and natural thing on earth to find yourself shackled by all of Apple's "technical chains", when all you want to do is use your phone like God intended, and get on with your life. So what’s so “simple” about me having to travel 100 miles to run back to my apt. in order to pop a few songs on my iPhone that come from the computer I am presently in front of, then travel 100 miles back to where I was to listen to them, all because Apple refuses to let me interface with more than one computer? No, sir. That's an inappropriate use of the word "simple". “Simple” is being able to use my phone as a disk drive and copy music like I would any file, as I can do on my Android device. And not have to worry about whether I am “logged in” to my music player, or whether I have the right difficult to find switches in the player turned on, or where my music comes from, or which “ID” is associated with which song, or spending hours and days figuring out why there are song titles that can not be deleted from your iTunes library or your iPhone… or any of all the other nonsense Apple makes you trudge through.
As I have now fully learned, there is absolutely nothing “simple” about transferring music to and from an iPhone. That said, being jailbroken has given me the chance to say eff you to iTunes. While the Bridge app mentioned is not the most elegant solution to me, at least it allows me to transfer music to the phone without the dictatorware that is Apple’s iTunes. Then, “Songbird” takes over quite nicely, when I want to play that music on the computer.
"Frankly, most of the time when people complain about it it's because it doesn't make it easy to "share" music libraries with others. But that is, of course, by design, since it prevents the iPod/iPhone from becoming an easy music piracy device."
This is not about sharing libraries with others, that's a different issue. This is about copying my own music from my own collection on my own computers on to my own iPhone. That should not be controversial, nor should it be artificially limited. Doing so is the very thing that drives people to piracy, since piracy is more convenient, less time consuming and less nerve-rattling than doing as the record companies demand. But I suspect that piracy is not a huge problem with the iPhone if the forums are any indication of that. So to make the majority suffer in frustration and curse Apple’s name is to shoot oneself in the foot. Not very wise, on their part, IYAM. Perhaps Apple customers suffered this for x many years because the competition wasn’t that strong. If more recent sales and stock figures are any indication, those days appear to be numbered.
Try it then... it will basically solve all your problems, I'm not sure why your beating around the bush and not using it.
Don't know where you read that about Pwntunes. could you provide a link? i'd be interested to see that. I've been using it for months with no problems whatsoever.
what do you mean fully compatible?
for example if: you tell your iphone to auto-sync will the songs be transfered? if so then no, they won't be transferred to iTunes. You can however drag and drop them off the phone and then put them into iTunes.
Pwntunes and Mewseek are not really similar only in the sense that they can both import music into the music app. Pwntunes makes your iPhone an external drive (like a flash drive) so it lets you drag and drop WITHOUT having to go into the system files of the iPhone, when you launch the music app they are automatically all imported, no need to select all and then click import or anything like that.
Mewseek partially does this but does NOT make the iPhone an external drive. To load music onto the iPhone you would have to use iExplorer or a similar program to put the music into the filesystem of the iPhone, (var/mobile/downloads) and then you open op MewSeek and can import ALL of them the music app (unlike Bridge where you have to do it one by one)
PwnTunes does this.
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Well, I did say why. I mentioned that my iPhone music app list got corrupted by the Music2Ipod app, to where I could not delete ghost songs from the phones playlist; not with the phone (swipe did not work) and not with iTunes. (I finally figured out a fix by deleting the phones iTunes sqlite database). And that I read of people having similar corruption problems with similar apps. So by fully compatible, I mean however and whatever app you use to load the songs into the phone, it must remain fully compatible when you sync your phone with iTunes on the computer. What shows up on the phone should show up in iTunes, with no differences.
Im hesitant to buy pwntunes unless I can fully confirm that it will play nice with my computers iTunes (whether that be pc or mac, since I use both). I dont want to find out that it also doesnt work, and then lose hours more time trying to fix transfer problems between my phone and my computer again. The idea is a good one, as I never knew the iPhone could at all be mounted like a flash drive. But I may have to forego pwntunes anyway, since it appears to only be Windows compatible, and Im presently on a Mac. I understand theres a workaround to this, which is to load the files on to the phone first with an SSH-type program via its raw filesystem. But that,s what Bridge does, so Im not sure where Pwntunes would differ. I think Ill try Mewseek first then.
UPDATE: I did. Mewseek definitely ups the ante over Bridge, easily allowing multiple imports at once. But it would not import my songs that are m4p files. Then it said "some songs have missing tags. Yet their tags are fully complete in iTunes. Then when I imported (three) mp3 songs, it gave me a green checkmark saying the transfer was successful, and they were no longer in the download list. But when I opened the music app, I could not find them anywhere. (I have no idea what it did with them either. After rebooting the device, they disappeared from the downloads folder). But the second time I tried this (just one mp3), I had no problem finding the mp3 in the music app. However, my iTunes on the mac could not find any of the (now 4) songs I added. (And no wonder, they are not in the folders iTunes expects to find them in. After rebooting the device, I found they all migrated to the Mewseek Import folder). Thats not a good sign. This means that now I have to (once again) delete and re-transfer my entire music library on the iPhone, because there is no way to delete songs in the music app playlist. (And in the filesystem, they are coded as to make them impossible to identify). I can delete the iPod playlist but theres no way to rebuild the playlist without retransferring the entire library.
(Oh well, its only 611 songs ).
I also tried to try Celeste, but could not even download it. It kept saying I need Gremlin v2.0 or greater, even though I already had that installed.
Threads like these make me happy I have no issues syncing music to my phone.
My only issue with iTunes is how long it can take to sync 5,000 songs to the phone lol
But to the OP, hope you find a fix that's not too difficult and time consuming to do every time you want to load some new music on the phone. If I were in your shoes, I think it would be easiest to just pick one computer, compile your music library on it and when you have new music on your other computers just copy them to a thumb drive and transfer them to the computer with the music library and sync to that one computer. It would eliminate a lot of issues.
It is annoying that we can't sync our phones to multiple libraries, but after six years of the iPhone being out and that not being changed, I don't see it changing anytime soon.
On iOS 5 there was a jailbreak tweak called multitunes that allowed the phone to sync with as many iTunes music libraries as you wanted. I used it on my dads iPhone. Not sure if it's been updated for iOS 6 yet. If you had like 2 or 3 large music libraries that would be a good option. But if you're literally just doing 5 or 10 songs from each computer, I'm not sure it would even be worth looking into.
My only issue with iTunes is how long it can take to sync 5,000 songs to the phone lol
But to the OP, hope you find a fix that's not too difficult and time consuming to do every time you want to load some new music on the phone. If I were in your shoes, I think it would be easiest to just pick one computer, compile your music library on it and when you have new music on your other computers just copy them to a thumb drive and transfer them to the computer with the music library and sync to that one computer. It would eliminate a lot of issues.
It is annoying that we can't sync our phones to multiple libraries, but after six years of the iPhone being out and that not being changed, I don't see it changing anytime soon.
On iOS 5 there was a jailbreak tweak called multitunes that allowed the phone to sync with as many iTunes music libraries as you wanted. I used it on my dads iPhone. Not sure if it's been updated for iOS 6 yet. If you had like 2 or 3 large music libraries that would be a good option. But if you're literally just doing 5 or 10 songs from each computer, I'm not sure it would even be worth looking into.
Re: copy a few songs from my iTunes to my iPhone
Have you resolved this? Here's my consideration.
As known to all, iTunes is the default application for iOS users to transfer music to iPhone and Windows PC. But iTunes does not support directly copy music files from other sources, like iPhone, for protecting the copyright of the music. So guess you may need to copy iPhone songs without using iTunes.
I have searched the Internet, finding that people are searching for iTunes alternatives to have faster transferring music from iPhone or iPod devices. To solve this, commonly, a third-party tool will be needed, like KiwiG PhonTunes. It helps to easily transfer iPhone music from computer or iPod.
Have you resolved this? Here's my consideration.
As known to all, iTunes is the default application for iOS users to transfer music to iPhone and Windows PC. But iTunes does not support directly copy music files from other sources, like iPhone, for protecting the copyright of the music. So guess you may need to copy iPhone songs without using iTunes.
I have searched the Internet, finding that people are searching for iTunes alternatives to have faster transferring music from iPhone or iPod devices. To solve this, commonly, a third-party tool will be needed, like KiwiG PhonTunes. It helps to easily transfer iPhone music from computer or iPod.
I'm surprised noone has mentioned Senuti (Itunes backwards) yet, if they have my apologies.
Ive used this program several times to transfer music from my Iphone to my Macbook. Not sure if its compatible with the newer versions of OSX but its worth shot.
Ive used this program several times to transfer music from my Iphone to my Macbook. Not sure if its compatible with the newer versions of OSX but its worth shot.