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Thursday, January 17th, 2008
Manually Manage Music on your iPhone
My biggest complaint to date about the iPhone has been that you cannot manually manage your music. You have to sync with a playlist in iTunes, which causes a couple issues.
One, if you have multiple computers, you can’t put songs on your iPhone from each computer - you can only sync it with one at a time. This has been pretty frustrating for me, since I use two computers with my iPhone (work and home).
The other issue (that didn’t even seem related to manually managing your music) is that you can’t listen to your music on your iPhone through iTunes. You can see your playlists and movies in iTunes, but they’re grayed out and cannot be clicked or edited.
I finally updated to iTunes 7.6 today, following my update to the iPhone software a couple days ago. Well, there’s a new checkbox in the ‘Summary’ tab for the iPhone. I little checkbox, out of the way, near the bottom. Miniscule, you might say. A tiny little addition. And the label next to the checkbox? It says:
Manually manage music and videos
Yes! They friggin fixed it! And it works. It worked exactly like you’d want it to - exactly like it worked on the iPod. It’s wonderful.
I don’t know how I didn’t hear about this. Maybe nobody else cared. But it’s great.
I’ve been testing some stuff out, and it’s pretty cool. When the iPhone is docked, you can still use it. I was listening to some music playing off the iPhone through iTunes, and I wondered what would happen if I went to the iPod feature on the iPhone. Well it works as if it’s not even playing through the computer. You can select a song and play it, and it has no effect on the song playing through iTunes. Kinda odd, but I can’t think of a situation when anyone would need to do that in real life.
If you’re playing music from your iPhone through iTunes, and you take the phone off the dock, the music just stops playing, and you don’t get any kind of errors. I was worried that manually managing it would break the phone’s ability to be yanked from the dock at random, but not so. When you edit a playlist, the phone displays the ‘sync in progress’ screen until the change has been made (usually very quick).
I can even play my custom ringtones through iTunes, which is kinda neat. I only have one right now (a Skyler Duncan track), so I don’t know if you can edit and rearrange them, not that doing that would have any obvious benefit. It does let you rename them though, which is kinda cool.
Basically this is awesome. The only thing I have left to ask for is disk mode so that I can use the iPhone as a portable hard drive. I know it doesn’t have a lot of storage, but usually I only have a few MB worth of files I want to take between computers. And now that I can manually manage music, it’s much easier to manage the amount of free space the phone has.
Anyway, I had to share. I’m sure none of you are as excited as I am, but someday when you get an iPhone, and it can make toast and waffles and pay your bills, you’ll think back to the day when good ol’ Dave told you how excited he was about manually managing his music. Of course, back then, the iPhones were limited to 8 GB (OMFG, that’s so small LOL PBR!) and they did not have a built-in tire gauge or umbrella. 
RELATED TOPICS: computer geek stuff, music
Congrats, Dave! I paid for the firmware upgrade for my iPod Touch - and I love the notepad and mail apps. Kinda sucks that they made us Touch owners pay ... but it is what it is.
(anonymous)
THURSDAY, JANUARY 17TH, 2008 7:31 PM1
how do you manually manage music on an ipod? it seems that i have to create a playlist and sync it on there like what you said about the iphone.
I buy a damn new apple computer and ipod. So much for being cool!
Chris THURSDAY, JANUARY 17TH, 2008 7:47 PM3
Chris, when you select your iPod in iTunes, there should be a series of tabs on the right-hand part of the screen. Under the Summary tab, near the bottom, there should be a checkbox called ‘Manually manage music and videos.’ Not sure if the wording is different on your iPod, probably depends which one you have and what version of iTunes you’re running.
Once you check that box, you might have to hit an ‘Apply’ or ‘Sync’ button on the bottom-right of that window. After doing that, you can browse your main music library and drag songs from there onto your iPod icon in the left column. If you have playlists on your iPod, you can drag the songs into specific playlists.
If none of that is working, check your computer. If the logo on the top looks less like an apple and more like the word ‘Sony,’ you might just be running Windows. In that case, immediately destroy the computer and send it back to Bill Gates. Thank you.
daveheinzel THURSDAY, JANUARY 17TH, 2008 8:32 PM4
Comments have been turned off since I moved over to Humzoo.
