Why can't I...

Mattus · 1 Dec 2011 at 00:29

... sync music to my iPhone from more than one iTunes library?

I hate this restriction. It's completely nonsensical. All I want to do is transfer some music from my PC to my iPhone... but I can't, because my iPhone is synced with my MacBook, so iTunes tells me that if I want to sync files from my PC, it will erase the iPhone and start afresh. Now I have to transfer 10GB of music from the PC to the MacBook just to put it on the iPhone.

Why on earth can you only sync with one computer at once? In fact, isn't the whole idea of having to be 'in sync' about ten years out of date, given that there's so many other ways to get content onto an iPhone these days? Why can't I just copy the damn files?

99% of the time I love my iPhone. The other 1% is when I have any contact with iTunes, which normally results in me wanting to throw it out of the nearest window.

/rant

Mattus · 1 Dec 2011 at 09:29

Deku said:
Enter iTunes Match stage left.

Enter me stage right, refusing to pay $25 per year to achieve something I should be able to do as a matter of course

Mattus · 1 Dec 2011 at 23:00

Basically I had a load of music in lossless format which I wanted to compress to 128kbps and put on my iPhone. I did it on my PC because that's where I store my lossless music (my MBP doesn't have enough disk space), and because my PC has a faster CPU for the conversion.

All I want to be able to do is sync the iPhone primarily to the MacBook, but be able to copy music from the PC when I want to. This isn't something which should take a hack to achieve. It's 2011. People have multiple computers.

What annoys me most is that it's an entirely artificial restriction which means I can't do with my £400 iPhone what I could do with a £10 MP4 player from Argos. Normally I approve of Apple's design decisions and find Android ugly and clumsy, but I just can't see a good reason for this limitation to exist.

Mattus · 3 Dec 2011 at 18:52

PardonTheWait said:
Just use manually manage music. Then you can put on music from two computers.

Nope, you can't - or at least, I can't.

I have the first computer set to manually manage music. But when I select 'manually manage music' on the second computer and try to save the setting, the dialog pops up telling me that the phone can only be synced with one iTunes library at a time, and I need to erase the iPhone to sync with the contents of this iTunes library.

Mattus · 5 Dec 2011 at 02:56

I believe that you can transfer music from multiple machines to an iPod, but not to an iPhone or iPad. This makes me even more convinced that the restriction is entirely pointless.