So I got that thing where the applications start up and immediately boot out, so I decided to go ahead and sync up my iPhone to my PC and see what happens.
What has happened is that despite the fact I have specifically told it to let me manually handle all music myself, it decided to delete all the music I’ve DLed from the iTunes store.
It also deleted every podcast I had downloaded, replacing it with the three in iTunes that were marked unplayed. When I went in to confirm that I didn’t ever want it to sync podcasts, that I’d do that myself, it deleted the podcasts folder on my iPhone and now I can’t move any podcasts over.
What the hell am I doing wrong here? This isn’t easy. This is a fucking nightmare. I’m missing the simplicity of my damn Shuffle.
Edit: Okay, if I let it sync podcasts, it has a podcasts folder on my phone. If I don’t let it sync any podcasts, it removes the podcasts folder and I can’t even manually add them. Awesome.
Edit edit: And even if I leave a folder open, I still can’t manually transfer podcasts.
Alright, I can’t figure out how to get the two songs I DLed back. They’re gone. I go to try to DL them again and it’s willing to let me pay to DL them, but it’s not going to let me DL them for free. It says that I’ve already DLed them and if I can’t find them on my PC I should click ‘check for available downloads’, but there are no available downloads.
God. No wonder people hate iTunes.
Edit: Okay. So here’s my question. How can I manually handle moving podcasts to my iPhone and how can I get a song that I DLed using my phone but which my phone awesomely deleted because … for some reason … that makes sense … I guess.
Edit 2: Well, no one seems to be particularly forthcoming, but really, here’s my number one question. Is there any way that I can tell iTunes ‘never, ever, ever, ever try to handle anything by yourself, I will move things over that I want moved over and you will never try to anticipate my needs’?
If you want to use the “Podcasts” folders, you have to use the auto-syncing stuff. It will always consider manually moved MP3s as regular “songs” regardless of the Genre.
Question: Why are you so insistent on handling things manually? iPods/iPhones work a LOT better doing it automatically. If the issue is space, auto-sync it with playlists. In any case, as far as I know, if “Manually Manage” is turned on, it won’t sync anything by itself unless you click on “Sync”.
It feels like I’d have to micromanage even more if I sync stuff. If I listen to a podcast, I need to go into iTunes and set it as not new. If I set everything as not new, next time I sync it will go ahead and delete all of them because they’re not new anymore.
I really fail to understand why this works this way. I moved to the iPhone from a 5th generation iPod. I could handle everything myself on it. I realize no one here is an Apple engineer, by why in the world would they deny me the ability to ‘do it the hard way’ if I want to do it the hard way?
Here’s what gets me. I use the iPhone’s built in iTunes music store. Find that a local band from where I grew up has a few songs I remember on there. I DL two of them. Then when dealing with this apps messup I have to sync and since the songs aren’t on my PC, the iPhone deletes it. So now they’re not on my PC, they’re not on my iPhone and Apple has my two bucks. That’s what syncing got me.
Lesson learned: Never, ever use the iTunes music store or the app store that come pre-installed on the iPhone. Neither losing music nor having to deal with deleting every app, reinstalling every app and then reorganizing the apps is really worth the effort. Though from now on when I see the ‘…and things will never be the same’ commercial, I’m gonna wish someone would break that guy’s fingers.
There is a look for purchased items option that has let me get music back. And I swear it says it is going to charge you but then it lets you download them again.
I donno. Maybe it doesn’t do that on the PC or maybe I just done something wrong?
It shouldn’t have done it at all. I have the ‘manually handle all music and videos’ button checked on my iPhone’s main settings screen. Yet it went ahead and did it.
That’d be nice, but everything I’ve seen seems to indicate that while you can DL apps as many times as you want, if you lose songs or videos from iTunes on your computer, Apple’s thought is that maybe you shouldn’t have been such a jerkface, jerkface.
Edit: I found the ‘recent purchases’ thing. There’s no auto-redownloader thingamajig. However, there is a ‘report a problem’ function! I think I’ll do that!
The iTunes purchased stuff sounds like a bug, or something got bolloxed. Any music I’ve bought on the phone has always synced back to my PC.
As for the podcasts, you can specify to keep the most recent 1,3, 5 or 10 podcasts for any that you are subscribed to. I have nearly 30 podcast subscriptions, and keeping the most recent 30-90 episodes on my iPhone, without manual intervention, hasn’t really consumed so much storage that I need to remove a track immediately after listening.
Yeah. I’m all hells of beat up. I’ll just sync podcasts from now on. The only ones that are apt to take up too much space are the video podcasts. I was just raised on my Shuffle originally, where you only really want the podcasts you haven’t listened to yet on there.
That’s one thing that’s always bothered me about iTunes. It’s a license when it suits them (you don’t own anything), and it’s an actual item when they want it to be (you can’t redownload your song). It feels disingenuous to pick and choose their philosophies like that. As a result, I never buy anything from iTunes.
I keep iTunes set to “manually manage”, and I haven’t had any problems yet. But I also only sync to one computer at a time. My home computer is my source if you will, and I use sharepod to copy the mp3s to my work computer.
