I love my iPhone 4, but am having a problem figuring out how to save my music to computer.
As far as I can tell, if I buy from the iTunes Store through my computer, I can save the files there, but if I use the iTunes Store App on my phone, the files will stay on my phone and I will be unable to transfer them to my computer unless I use some 3rd party software.
That can’t be right. Is it?
As far as I am aware, from owning an iphone and an ipod, any music or tv/film you buy from your phone is supposed to be transfered to your computer next time you sync.
It is possible there is an option you can turn off/on (default should be on) for ‘sync purchased content’. I am not at my itunes computer so I can’t give you more concrete answers. I’m sure someone else will though 
I’m kind of afraid to sync now, because I think it will write over all the songs on my computer. I keep it in “Manually manage my music” mode. This is a little frustrating.
When I sync my iPod Touch (essentially an iPhone without the phone), and iTunes detects apps on the Touch that are not on the computer, I get a window asking me if I want to transfer them from the Touch to the iTunes library. (Usually the answer is no, because I’ve intentionally deleted those apps.)
I’ve had the opposite experience. When I connect my iPod touch to my PC using iTunes, the content of the iPod has been deleted from it. I bought my iPod in October, and out of the 4 times it has been connected to iTunes, I’ve lost all of my data and apps twice. It’s like iTune said " I see you have some new items on your iPod - here, let me delete that for you". WTF? And that was after setting up iTunes for ‘Manually manage my music’.
When I connect it again, I’m really not sure will happen. But I need to do it at some point. 19 GB of songs are no longer on my iPod, but that 19 GB is not free - the touch is reporting it as used space.
The iphone should let people just drag whatever music they want into an open folder–to get music into the phone. That would make sense. But nooooo, you have to use stupid Itunes which wants to do a bunch of synching! I hate Itunes. I’ve waited three hours for a synch to finish. And yes, sometimes it deletes stuff for no good reason. Basically, Itunes prevents you from managing your own files.
If it is not too late maybe you can return your iphone.
In the File menu of iTunes, there’s an item that says “Transfer purchases from iPod”. That does what you want.
Once that’s done, provided you’ve told iTunes to sync your music, it should happen automatically.
Thank you, tellyworth. That was exactly what I was looking for. Apparently, the engineers at Apple have confused the word ‘synchronize’ with ‘copy everything from one source and erase everything on the destination drive.’ At least there’s a work around.
It’s not a mistake. It’s deliberate as a way to get the licenses they did for the iTunes store. The music companies wanted to makes sure you couldn’t just plug your iPod up to your friend’s computer and give him a free copy.
You don’t have to sync your entire iTunes library to your iPhone every time you connect. If you select “Manually manage my music” in your iPhone status window, you can drag individual albums and songs to your iPhone in the left pane and drop them onto your phone. A sync in manual mode only takes a minute or two versus syncing your entire library every time. And I’ve never had music deleted from my iPhone when in manual mode unless I delete it deliberately myself.