Hi everyone. This may be a dumb question, and I'm not even sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm wondering if there's a way to sync the downloaded music contents of my iPhone, playlists and all, to my Mac. The music library is not tied to Apple Music, in fact, I don't even have an account. I'm basically trying to do the reverse of what we used to do back in the day when you had all your music and playlists and album art on iTunes and you would sync it to an iPhone/iPod.
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Reverse Music Syncing
- Thread starter joeblow7777
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Sync music between your Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
On your Mac, sync all or a selection of music to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
support.apple.com
Thanks but this explains how to sync onto your iPhone. I'm trying to do the opposite.
I'm familiar with this process. I've done it many times, but it only syncs to the device. It even shows that in the instructions that you linked. It seems that if I were to do this, it would just replace the library on my phone with the empty library on my Mac, which again is the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
*Edit to add*
I just tested this with my iPad which had a music library I didn't care about. It warned me that the currently synced library on the device would be replaced, I proceeded, and as I expected, the iPad's music library was replaced by the Mac's blank one.
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Slightly different question. Let's say I have my entire library on a Windows PC in iTunes. If I can copy that to an external drive, is there a way to move it from there to the Mac in such a way that playlists would be retained?
I'm confident that I can move the songs themselves, but I don't know how or where the data for playlists is stored.
I'm confident that I can move the songs themselves, but I don't know how or where the data for playlists is stored.
You might try the steps in this YT video. This didn't work for me on Big Sur or Monterey, but maybe that was due to a bug that's been fixed in Sonoma. If you try it and it works, please let us know.
I ended up copying my entire iTunes folder to a USB drive and importing it using the Music.app File->Import... menu item. Before doing this, be sure to go to the Music->Preferences Files tab and make sure that both Keep Music Media folder organized and Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library are checked. If you fail to do this, files won't be copied to your Mac and the resulting Music.app library will be pointing to files on your USB drive.
Importing this way will not copy your playlists. You'll need to export those one-at-a-time from iTunes as xml files, and then import those into Music.app. It's a pain if you have very many of them.
You might also find that you lose much, or most, of your album artwork. If you check Automatically Update Artwork for Imported Songs in the Music.app->Preferences Advanced tab, it will eventually download new artwork from the Music service. This can take a long time (days) and the new artwork might differ from what you had before.
EDIT: this YT video suggests a way to get playlists imported all-at-once. I have not tried this.
I ended up copying my entire iTunes folder to a USB drive and importing it using the Music.app File->Import... menu item. Before doing this, be sure to go to the Music->Preferences Files tab and make sure that both Keep Music Media folder organized and Copy files to Music Media folder when adding to library are checked. If you fail to do this, files won't be copied to your Mac and the resulting Music.app library will be pointing to files on your USB drive.
Importing this way will not copy your playlists. You'll need to export those one-at-a-time from iTunes as xml files, and then import those into Music.app. It's a pain if you have very many of them.
You might also find that you lose much, or most, of your album artwork. If you check Automatically Update Artwork for Imported Songs in the Music.app->Preferences Advanced tab, it will eventually download new artwork from the Music service. This can take a long time (days) and the new artwork might differ from what you had before.
EDIT: this YT video suggests a way to get playlists imported all-at-once. I have not tried this.
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It does not sync both ways - it just syncs from computer to phone. If you connect the phone to a different computer and ask it to "Sync," it will erase all music that's on the phone first.
OP - what you want to do isn't possible, short of perhaps some 3rd party software to hack into it. I believe it's due to Apple's agreements with music publishers but regardless, it doesn't do it.
The iMazing app claims to be able to do what the OP wants. I've never tried it and don't know if there's a free trial. It's fairly easy to recover music from non-touch iPods without the need for 3rd party software, but that's not what's asked for here.
Shouldn't the purchased music on iPhone be available for download in the Music app on Mac when logged into the same iTunes account? Once downloaded to the Mac, you should be able to sync the library/playlist to the iPhone.
If the music on iPhone isn't purchased, how did it end up in the music library on iPhone? You would have had to sync with a computer in the first place.
If the music on iPhone isn't purchased, how did it end up in the music library on iPhone? You would have had to sync with a computer in the first place.
The music wasn't purchased through iTunes/Apple Music. Mostly ripped from CDs back in the day. I did sync with a computer (Windows, with iTunes) but I now have a new computer (Mac). I would like to be able to manage my library and sync with the new Mac going forward, so I'm trying to get my library (playlists and all) onto the Mac.
The playlists are really the tricky part, because I can just copy the songs from the previous computer onto a drive and put them on the Mac, but then it's just one big list of songs.
Dude!!
It looks like this did it! It was really that easy. There might be a few little hiccups to tidy up, but I think it worked for the most part.
Thank you!
