To start, as will become apparent, I hate Apple. I am a diehard PC user and only got an iPhone 6 months ago cause, well, I had to. And it does work well as my car’s main stereo source.
Anyways, here’s my situation: One of my harddrives, the one with all my mp3s, crashed. I use Mozy online backup and restored most of the data to a new harddrive successfully this way. However I had to re-import them all into iTunes on my PC (even though I put them onto the new harddrive using the same drive letter and folder as the old one, iTunes still wouldn’t recognize them). I rarely buy much new music and I don’t like Apple’s DRM so I never buy from iTunes (usually plain mp3s from Amazon instead). I also think the way iTunes does auto-syncing is ridiculous so I also always use “Manually manage music and video”.
Now iTunes, in its infinite wisdom, is saying that my iPhone4 is synced with another iTunes library. It’s essentially the exact same library, the same folders of mp3 albums, but because its a new harddrive I guess it thinks it’s different. So if I try to check the “Manually manage…” checkbox now iTunes says it has to wipe my iPhone’s (perfectly identical) music library and “re-sync” it (with my identical, restored, mp3 library)!
Is there no way around this? Do I really, really have to let fucking iTunes erase my iPhone’s music and replace it with exact duplicates? I know it’ll only take one night (AGAIN!!) but still, why?
And if this really is so, let me just say, Fuck you Apple! Your hardware & software is for retarded morons and Microsoft is not a tenth as evil as you pretentious, smug, assholes!
I’m sorry, I always get a little irritated when people point out Apple’s super restrictive DRM, when it hasn’t been around for five years. Every song you can buy on the iTunes Store (and every song you bought in the last years) has no DRM whatsoever and is 256kB/s AAC (which is better quality than MP3 anyway).
Also, what is your problem with iTunes syncing? Most problems can be solved very easily when you know which box to check or uncheck. Smart playlists can also go a long way.
I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t manually manage nuthin’. That’s what I bought a computer for. Smart playlists are brilliant. I don’t want to figure out which of my 20,000 songs go on different devices, all with different capacities.
So what is the BFD?
Plug in the phone let it start to sync and go have a cup of coffee. (I would recommend decaf)
When you are done with the coffee you phone will be synced.
Once again what is the BFD? Christ it probably took longer to write the OP than resyncing would have taken.
I know exactly how long it takes I had to replace a broken iPhone a while back.
When done the sync was so good when I opened the web browser the same webpages were there.
I was impressed and my buddy that crashed his droid was jealous.
No need to wipe and restore here, OP is just looking to overwrite the existing music on his phone with the new, identical library. It shouldn’t take that long, and with the current version of iTunes, that can be done over wifi.
When you sync your phone with a different library, it wipes everything off your phone and then re-syncs everything. Restore was the wrong term, as it doesn’t need to return everything to factory settings, but it’s not a simple sync. I’m in the “it’s not a big deal” camp too, but it is a slightly bigger deal than a simple sync.
Syncing your library if there aren’t substantial changes doesn’t take long at all. Re-filling a 16GB iPhone from empty is a slightly longer time investment.
I get that it’s more than a simple sync, but it’s in no way the PITA that a full restore is. I just went through that whole process with a number of devices that had been part of the iOS 5 beta program, so it’s fresh in my memory.
But still, it’s not like there’s any user involvement. You start the sync and go watch tv or something. And like I said, with iOS 5, you can do it over wifi. And either tethered or wifi, the sync no longer holds the device hostage any more, it’s still usable during the transfer.
That’s definitely true – I’d forgotten about that. Probably one of the biggest unsung features of iOS 5, I think. It didn’t really occur to me that it was happening until I realized that I’d picked up my phone and started hunting for all the “big name” features while everything was still being synced.
I agree, I don’t like iTunes’ handling of music and especially photos and videos. Syncing is for when things are changed often, like documents and playlists. For photos I just want to choose photos I want to carry with me all the time, copy them once and forget about them. Syncing makes this so much more difficult because you have to keep a set of the same photos on your computer, and have to worry about moving or deleting them.
The thing about Apple is, their products work fine when you use them only as intended and nothing goes wrong.
The big deal is that there is no reason for the system to work that way. The big deal is that data costs money, so tethering is the only solution unless you want to rack up gigabytes worth of data charges. A phone you can’t take with you is effectively out of commission.
That said, I have no sympathy for the OP since he went with the phone from the company that tells users what they want. If you hate Apple, don’t buy their products.
Your buddy with the Droid was mistaken in his jealousy. I use a Droid X2™. For various nefarious hardware reasons, I had 3 phones- one at a time- in my hand in the space of 9 days in October.
At least on Verizon, the DroidX2® restores everything. Everything, in every area, except for two key bits: It cannot remember widgets I have created, which is fine. Allows me to re-examine them and make new ones and shed unused ones. It also does not retain text messages. Must admit- I have never seen a cellular phone that imported all old text messages when doing a re-synch.
Does the iPhone store all texts on The iCloud or are all text messages lost when re-synching an iPhone?