Iphone/Ipod Touch help needed, please

[ReformedCharacter]

DP has an Ipod Touch and I have an Iphone. He has our whole music library on his device (spent hours importing DVDs) and now I want to listen to it on my iphone. We're using different computers if that matters - he's on a PC and I'm on a mac.

I can see our music collection in Itunes, under SHARED, and I can listen to it on my mac, but I don't know how to transfer it to my iphone.

Any help?

there is a way to share itunes across devices.

how would you normally sync music to your iphone? (sorry, we have multiple ipods/ipads/itouches but no iphone!)

so, is all the music in itunes on your mac?

is it also in itunes on the PC?

where do you sync your iphone?

where does your dh sync his ipod?

Umm...

We got these as early Christmas presents over the weekend so I'm still feeling like a total div trying to work this out. Right...

DP has imported all our CDs to itunes on our PC. Then he synced that to his touch. He's also purchased a few tracks over itunes on his touch.

I have plugged my phone into my mac and synced my calendars/contacts etc but no music (don't have any music on here, although I can listen to all the CDs he's imported via itunes).

DP can sync his touch on either the mac or PC as he has set up home sharing (I think ). I think I can too although PC is in use at the moment so can't check.

Our devices show up on each others itunes under SHARED.

Umm, am I making any sense?

Have you tried dragging one of the tunes from your DP's PC's Shared Folder into your normal iTunes library? I'm guessing that that won't work though...

I think that this is going to be something that iTunes isn't going to let you do easily. There are bits of software out there that will help you to do this, which is what makes me think you can't just drag the tune into your iTunes, but I can't vouch for them as I've never used them.

Probably the simplest way is to grab a memory stick and nip to your DP's PC, copy the stuff you want onto the stick, go back to your Mac and then import it into your iTunes from where it can get onto your iPhone.

Yep, I'm thinking it's something to do with DRM as well.

Can't drag and drop.

You've got me thinking though. I could connect the mac to PC via a USB and transfer our tracks that way. I doubt if it will let me copy the tracks that he's purchased via itunes, but that's no biggie really.

I definitely don't want to have to import all those CDs to my mac manually.

I have found third party software via google but I wanted to check first that I wasn't missing something.

Or another thought....

You could set your iPhone to manually manage it's music, so that it won't automatically make it look like what's in your iTunes library. Do this when it's connected to your Mac through it's settings in iTunes.

Take the iPhone to the PC, plug it in, when asked tell it not to automatically sync it to iTunes and then copy the music on to it.

You won't (easily) be able to then get the music from your iPhone onto your Mac but it will be on your phone.

If you don't do that first step and set your iPhone to manually manage it's music then when you connect it back to your Mac iTunes will think "oh look, there's lots of music on here that you don't have in your library, you must have deleted it from there, so I'll delete it from the iPhone too so that it matches up".

right, hmm.

I can't fully remember what I did when I needed to share our itunes. I do remember thinking that home sharing was not the answer for us though (at the time, dh had a nano, I had an itouch. we have since added in an extra itouch and an ipad...)

anyway, I think the easiest thing to do would be to copy your itunes onto an external drive form the PC, then copy it inot your itunes on the mac.

that would leave the itunes on the PC happily (copy it across, don't move it), and also install the music onto your mac.

I found a few hints on various forums to help me with copying/moving itunes across (we ended up with itunes on the one PC, but different accounts used in different profiles - the answer was definitely to move itunes to an external drive)

if you plug your iphone in to sync, and it shows up as a device, can you not then click on its name, to n
bring up the home screen for your phone, then manually sync from there?

"I doubt if it will let me copy the tracks that he's purchased via itunes, but that's no biggie really."

Yes it would, music purchased from iTunes no longer has any DRM protection built into it, it's not tied to any particular computer.

There's no need for any special software to move the music from one computer to another. You can just copy the files to a memory stick or directly to the other computer if you set up some network accessible file stores.

Have to go out so will come back and read later.

Thanks Silver and badgers for all the help

Silverfrog, an external drive would be ideal; I must get one.

I completely ballsed this up last night. I plugged my phone into PC and synced so that I got our collection on it. But it said I could only sync with 1 account at a time. I thought that would be fine but it deleted all my books I'd bought. So then I went back to my mac and it deleted my collection.

Badgers, you said that would happen, but I didn't understand until I did it

So, I plugged the mac into the PC and transferred all the tracks over here. That's sorted it temporarily but it's not a proper solution because every time we buy music we'll have to put it on both computers. So, an external hard drive is what we need.

Badgers, I didn't know the DRM had been removed from itunes tracks. I'm really impressed by that.

Thanks, both of you

Follow the instructions here on how to set your iPod to manual mode under the heading Manual Mode here:
support.apple.com/kb/ht1202

Do that on both the Mac and the PC.

Then you can copy what you want from either machine onto the iPod and when you connect it to the other one it won't wipe it off.

If you think what you told the two computers to do, "Make the iPod look like this iTunes", and then think that both your computers are different you can see what it does what it does.

Ah, that makes perfect sense now.

Thank you badgers.