Dd, her i-tunes, her i-pod, her i-phone and her laptop.

[Pan]

Phew!

Essentially dd has 65 songs on her i-tunes library on the laptop, which links to her i-pod. The i-pod has now been usurped by the i-phone and she wishes to make a 'clean start', with a new library on her laptop which only exhanges with her i-phone. The i-phone has lots of photos she wishes to save to laptop for example.

Soo..can she ditch her current i-tunes library, and re-install another library which will be connected to her i-phone? IF so, what must she do?

I've checked the apple site but the question is too messy for them!

She doesn't want all of the photos/music to go onto the i-phone, as this is what would happen IF she just tried to 'share' the i-tunes library with the i-pod and i-phone.

No, she wants to get rid of the whole library on the laptop totally, in the hope/expectation that a newly-downloaded software will be able to talk only with the i-phone and have no register of the i-pod....

Okay. We've wiped i-tunes off the laptop, and now re-installing...

If we were to connect the i-phone to laptop now, would it just wipe the phone??

If I have understood you correctly her purchase history from her account will be present no matter what version of iTunes she uses, she can deselect songs or albums that she doesn't want on her iPhone with the tick boxes next to the song, and then when she connects her iPhone to the computer she can change the settings that it will only copy songs that she has selected. I hope that helps.

Well, I think it helps.....

What I really need to know now is that when she connects her phone to the laptop, it won't automatically try to synch the contents of the library ( zero) with the phone and so wipe the phone content entirely. This won't happen will it??

They synch in both directions. It should add the iPod library back into iTunes.

For dd I have a separate folder, put all her music in that and manually sync with that folder only.

Ah, I thought so Porto. Thank you. I'm going to suggest she manually deletes anything she doesn't want to keep that's in the library (on the i-pod 'account') and then connects up her i-phone to the laptop and the software should recognise it as such and use it for synching, in the way you suggest?

If it wipes the i-phone she will never, ever forgive me. But I don't think that will happen.

Make sure she backs everything up separately/to a non-I-anything directory before she starts!

Right. We've plugged the i-phone into the laptop and it hasn't 'wiped' it, so I'm not in the 'never forgiven' stakes...

But..the video/pictures/music is only going from phone to i-tunes laptop, not the other way round as well. EG we have just bought an Ed Sheerin record from the i-tunes store, and it appears in the library, but when we plug the phone into the laptop it ignores it. I've looked in the 'devices' and both pod and phone are listed. Surely the Sheerin should synch to the phone?

Am I being really dumb, or just a bit dumb?

Neither, but have given a good reason for me to stay clear of iTunes and iPhones, iPods, etc.

NB I'm not totally anti-Apple (I have 5 iMac and a couple of older Mac systems, but have used non-Apple kit for mobile, tablet and MP3 player).