From the course: iOS 13 and iPadOS: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Sync music from your computer

From the course: iOS 13 and iPadOS: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

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Sync music from your computer

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- In this chapter, we're going to look at how to get content from your computer onto your IOS device. Now if you're using Windows, you'll connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer with the cable that the device came with and you'll use iTunes to manage the content on your phone. Now if you're on a Mac running at least the latest version of MacOS, currently MacOS 10.15 Catalina, you'll manage your IOS device directly through the finder. But if you're running an older version of MacOS, like 10.14 Mohave or earlier, you'll continue to use iTunes. Fortunately, there's very little difference between using the finder in Catalina and using iTunes on older Macs and Windows. Just start by connecting your iPhone or iPad to your computer. Now I'm running Catalina on my Mac so I'm going to open up a new finder window. You can see I can select my iPhone here on the left. If you're running iTunes you'll select your device at the top of the iTunes window. I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger. Now you see with my phone selected, we see several categories running across the top of the screen, and the General category is currently selected. If you're on iTunes, this will be the Summary category. But in this section, you'll find your device's vitals like its name, capacity, software version and serial number. The rest of these categories are for managing the content you place on your IOS device like music, photos, movies and so on. So let's take a look at how to get music on your device. For this example, I'm going to come down to the options section and I'm going make sure to uncheck Manually manage music, movies and TV shows. This means I'll be able to automatically sync my content instead of dragging in songs one by one to my iPhone. Now I should mention at this point that if you subscribe to either Apple's iTunes match service or their Apple music service, you won't be able to sync music the way I show you in this movie. Instead music will be synced and managed directly from your device since your music will live in iCloud. But for now I'm going to select the music category. Now it's very important to note here, that if you already have songs on your device, syncing here will erase all that existing content, which is necessary if you want the items on your device in your computer, like playlists, to be identical. But for this example I'm okay with erasing any existing music on my iPhone, so I'm going to choose Sync music onto Garrick's iPhone. Now we have two sync choices here: Entire music library means every single song in my music library will be copied to my device. Or I could choose to sync only Selected artists, albums, genres, and playlists. Now it's entirely possible that the size of your iTunes library may exceed the storage capacity of your IOS device, so syncing the entire library might not be an option. If that's the case, choose Selected artists, albums, and so on. And then we can browse the music on the computer by Artists, Albums, Genres, and Playlists. Now here in MacOS Catalina, this is the content stored in the Music app. If you're using iTunes on Mac or Windows, this will be the content stored in iTunes. And all you have to do here is make your way through these categories and select the items you want synced to your device. Once you do that, just click apply and that music will start copying over. You can see the little spinning wheel over there. Now the beauty of this is that once you have made your selections, you don't have to do anything else. So if I have The Beatles selected under Artists, for example, all of my Beatles music will get copied to my iPhone, but if later I add a Beatles album that I didn't previously have in my library, the next time I sync my iPhone that new Beatles album will automatically be copied to it. And that's pretty much how to sync music to your iPhone or iPad and it works the same way for movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks and so on. Under each of these media categories is an option to sync them and in each case you can choose what sort of content to sync. So if you understand how to sync music, you then understand how to sync music and TV shows and other media content. Basically, the choices boil down to either copying over all of your content in each category or just copying selected content you haven't watched or listened to yet.

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