Cannot manually manage music and videos without erasing and syncing first

I am having the same issue, ep1curus.

Macs are purported to be more intuitive than PC's. Why, then, have a checkbox labeled "Manually manage music and videos," when in fact the setting is more like syncing / wiping out your content?

I have the exact same thing but a little different. I did not crash my drive nor did it happen right after the 8.0 iTunes update.

Last time I had the phone connected I switched to manual and it did not prompt me. Now the manually manage checkbox is not ticked anymore and when I do I have to erase because according to iTunes my phone syncs with a different iTunes.

Message was edited by: anthraxxx

Same problem here. I am using my iPhone with different computers (several Macs at home), and with iPods I could always manually manage and could add songs/video from multiple computers. I am now traveling with my work computer, have bought some music from iTunes store and can't seem to add it to my iPhone without wiping out everything that's on there.... what gives? Please help me fix this problem!

Klaus

I have the same problem. I used another computer to put media into iphone. now I can't put any more media from another computer without deleting the old ones.

Iphone will sync with ONE itunes library at a time. Yes, even with Manually Manage Music.

It is designed this way.

I cannot express how disappointing this was for me to find out.

I want my music to be mobile, I don't want to have to copy it to every computer I want to listen to it on. I want to listen to it from the device, and be able to buy a new album at work or at home. This is a major disappointment for me, as every other device I have owned including my iPod Touch had this capability. I could authorize 5 machines and manually sync, and the music on that device could be played and managed on those authorized machines. For example, my wife has her own music collection, and I have mine, but we have a media center connected to our flat-screen in the living room, that we use for playing music when we are entertaining guests, and with our old iPods and iPod Touch devices, we could unplug one of our devices and plug the other persons in and listen to music from both our libraries without copying the music to that computer, as long as we authorized that machine for the both of us. Now with our iPhones there is no way to keep our seperate librarys and be able to play music on multiple computers in our house and at work, which we have always been able to do until our iPhones. The whole point of the iPhone for me was to be able to combine two devices and now because of the lack of this feature I still have to keep all our iPods around too... Dumb. I almost took our phones back because of this, and if apple doesn't fix it, I probably won't buy another. They should have at least mentioned this little fact before selling the devices to us. I know it's a different device, but it's similar enough that you expect it to work the same as the iPod and iPod Touch. It's not like I am wanting to be able to copy music from the device to multiple machines, it's exactly the opposite... I just want to be able to copy music to the device and listen to it at home and at work... why all apples other devices do this, and the iPhone doesn't is completely perplexing to me, and a serious oversight on there part. This pill would not be so hard to swallow if I had been warned about this prior to dropping almost a grand for iPhones for myself and my wife, expecting what I saw as a more advanced device to work at least as good as the other similar devices I own did.

I am experiencing the same behavior where it appears my iPhone (1st gen) will not allow you to really "manually manage music" as you can on a regular iPod. I didn't understand this so I got my trusty 80 GB iPod out and went through the same exercise. With it set to "manually manage", I was able to drag and drop music from my iTunes libraries on BOTH Macs to the iPod. I can't do this on my iPhone which makes zero sense to me. When I connect the phone to my second Mac, "manually manage" is unchecked. Hooking it back to the first Mac, it IS checked. Is there a real iPod on the phone or not? . If I had to guess, I would say it is a design mistake that will be rectified in a future phone update. Maybe that's a hope......

I assume they intensionally designed it to work with only one computer at a time. Can you imagine the complexity of contacts, mail accounts, calendars, bookmarks, music, purchased video, rented video, applications, etc. if you were able to sync to multiple computers? Unlike the ipods, the iphone was not designed to act as a flash drive to move files between computers.

Not that I like it but I understand the limitations with one way synching. My question is what about the music I paid for and downloaded via the apps button from the phone? Will that music be deleted when I synch with my computer? If that is the case why use the phone to purchase items.

Music and apps purchased and downloaded with your iPhone should be transferred to your iTunes library on your computer when syncing.

I'm sorry, it still doesn't wash IMHO. With the amazing stuff Apple does, I think they could make it so music could act the same on a standalone iPod or an iPod on an iPhone. I have read support articles explaining that on the phone, you can manually manage music while auto-syncing other things, so treating each category differently could be done. I just don't get why an iPod on a phone should act any differently than a standalone iPod. What am I missing?

The reason you can manually manage music and videos with an iPod with an iTunes library on multiple computers is because the iPod supports what is called disk mode - which enables the iPod's storage as an external drive.

Although it is possible to manually manage music and videos with the iPhone, the iPhone does not support disk mode, so you can manually manage music and videos with an iTunes library on a single computer only.

This is a user to user help forum only for technical support issues and questions, so it is doubtful any fellow users here know why Apple has chosen not to support disk mode with the iPhone, and doubtful Apple will tell you or anyone else their reason or reasons why. Since disk mode is supported with the iPod, which means it can be supported with the iPhone if Apple chose to do so, I can only assume there is a valid reason or reasons why disk mode is not supported with the iPhone for which we aren't privileged.

I dont know if this helps. I was able to sync my iphone files into my other computer and after I had done this, I was able to yet again sync iphone with this second computer. It was very uncomfortable to let the itunes erase all from my iphone, but NOW i have the album bought on iphone, album synced with other itunes/comp AND album that I have bought previously on this second comp that I have used.

So, it works, but VERY uncomfortably...

But yet to discover what happens after I sync with my first comp (that I initially synced my iphone with)...

Wow, complicated... And not nice. Its like having two cups of milk and you choose to fill cup one, but you have to pour milk from your cup one first to cup two in order to get all the milk into the cup one...

Manual draganddroppin would have been my choice anyway... Pouring only once.