Manually managing Music to device not possible in Catalina Finder at moment?
With the install to Catalina came the new Music application and devices regulated to the finder for syncing, backups, etc.
I have always preferred to leave my phones, pads and pods set to a manually managed setting for loading music as my library far outstripped the storage available on any given device. My method was a simple drag and drop of the album to the device icon in the iTunes sidebar and all the enclosed tracks were loaded, over cable or WiFi, typically without a hitch.
I expected only a slightly more cumbersome experience post iTunes: opening a Finder window as well as the jukebox, to drag and drop between.
After installing, the Music Tour seemed to focus heavily on auto sync instructions and I was afraid that the option to manage may have been removed. It has not:
While Music was struggling to download the album art it trashed during the update and Catalina was generally "optimizing" itself I quickly plugged in a nearby iPad and dropped an EP onto the finder device and got a sync. Relieved I left the Mac to itself, satisfied that the great "unbloating" of iTunes was behind us.
After an overnight and a reboot, I have never been able to perform a manual sync since. In fact, attempting to drag to the finder will sometimes uncheck the manual option box altogether.
I jumped on here this morning and find a couple of manually managing Catalina threads with many views so I wanted to add another, draw attention to the fact this seems to be broken, and see if anyone has found the juice to make this work again.
Syncing by checking a bunch of artist, album, genre boxes may be the preferred method for many but I like the granular ability to select 2 discs of a 5 disc box set and dumping on my device instead of adding the entire collection at any given time.
iMac Line (2012 and Later)