Here’s my situation. My PC died last week with my iTunes library. Long story short, I obtained another PC, installed iTunes on it and hooked up my iPhone. I checked “Manually manage music and video” and a message popped up saying, “The iPhone (My iPhone) is synced with another iTunes library. Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes library?”
I don’t want to do that, as I have nearly 6000 songs on my iPhone and nothing is on the second computer. I do have back ups of all my music on a Creative Zen player which happily can transfer music back onto the PC, but this will be time consuming and a pain in the ass to boot. I don’t want to erase music from the iPhone, I just want to manually add new songs as the mood strikes me. I could add music to the second computer and import it into iTunes, but I don’t really want to due to the time and effort that will be involved. Is there a way I can get the iPhone, which was originally synced to one PC, to work in manual mode on another without losing everything and having to re-sync it?
This is why I regard iTunes as a necessary evil yet hate it with the heat of the Springfield tire fire.
Here’s a start. How to use your iPod to move your music to a new computer:
If the “Copy music to new computer” step works, you should be all set.
The other thing you might need to do is this:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1848
That’s not really going to help. My old computer is dead. As in won’t boot into Windows. And I don’t need to put the music on my iPhone. It’s there already. I just want to add music to it manually without recreating my entire iTunes library on the second computer or erasing the music I already have on my iPhone. But thank you anyway.
Also, the article mentions transferring music from an iPod, but this may not work with an iPhone.
I think Sharepod will do what you want.
I’ll look into it, thanks. It looks like it may just be what I need. I just want to manually manage my iPhone like I could on my old computer and it looks like I might be able to do this. It does say it has iPhone and iPod Touch support so that looks good from here.
Just want to bump this to say, thank you, Captain Morgan. Sharepod is a marvelous program. It recognized my iPhone and I can move files back and forth without having iTunes open at all. Great substitute for iTunes and takes less memory to boot.
Meh. Sharepod doesn’t work with iOS4. It wouldn’t let me delete files from my iPhone. I did find one that’s iOS4 compatible, though. CopyTrans. It is free, requires iTunes to be installed, but not open, and let me work with my iPhone in manual mode without wanting to sync the entire library, just as I was working with iTunes on my previous PC. It’s intuitive and only uses 128 megs of RAM. I’d recommend this to anyone looking for an iTunes alternative. Thanks for all the advice, however, everybody.