Delete some music from iPhone, keep all of it in iTunes on Win10 laptop

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Delete some music from iPhone, keep all of it in iTunes on Win10 laptop

Context: All my music is in iTunes on my Win10 laptop. Almost (not quite all) of that is music I ripped from CDs that we own, i.e. only a small portion is downloaded from iTunes Store. I sync some of that music from laptop to my iPhone 6s: the iPhone holds a subset of the laptop iTunes library. I'm trying to reduce what's on the iPhone w/out losing it fr the laptop library. And last time I tried it was a disaster, trying to do it right this time.

The problem: I searched for "delete music from my iPhone," and the instructions said to use Apple Music on iPhone and delete. However, the last time I deleted music directly from my iPhone 6s, the next time I synced to iTunes, it butchered my library, took me hours to get it back from a reasonably recent backup, figure out the changes, etc. A serious pain, I want to avoid doing that again. That was a year or so ago, now I'm running outta space on iPhone.

What I want: I need to delete a bunch of music from my iPhone 6s (iOS 13.2, latest iTunes update installed). I don't want to lose that music in iTune on my laptop (Win10, system is also fully updated), nor corrupt my library. Just wanna delete some of my music from my iPhone.

What's the recommended process? Thanks for your guidance, and please excuse my obvious worry, this was a total horrorshow last time.

Alex

Windows, Windows 10

Posted on Nov 2, 2019 2:24 PM

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Answer 1

i_rina

Community Specialist

Nov 7, 2019 6:30 AM in response to alexmoss17

Hey there alexmoss17,

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. I understand you want to remove music from your iPhone without affecting your iTunes library. I’ll be happy to help with this.

In this case, I think you want to follow the steps under ‘Sync or remove content using iTunes’ as stated in this link:

Use iTunes to sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod with your computer

Basically, you’ll want to unselect what you want to remove from your iPhone directly in iTunes under your iPhone > Music. This shouldn't remove any music from iTunes at all.

Let me know if that helps.

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Answer 2

alexmoss17 Author

Level 1

18 points

Nov 12, 2019 12:22 PM in response to i_rina

Thanks, eventually this did work, but it was not straightforward.

Fwiw, in case anyone else sees this or has insight into it: I was not able to follow those directions without wiping all of the music off my iPhone and resyncing from the start. I started by following the process step by step, and my system would not allow me to manually check songs to unselect (on the iPhone). And nothing was checked in iTunes on laptop, though I got the music onto iPhone in the first place by syncing fr same laptop using iTunes.

After much prodding and prying, I ended up starting over. I manually selected every single item that I wanted to sync (multi-select using shirft-click or control-click was not permitted / didn't work, I had to manually select each individual item). I *think* I have it set up ok now. But I have no idea if it will work the next time I try, there's no way I can possibly go through a 2 hour process every time I want to add / remove a few songs from my iPhone. I'm guessing there's something different in my setup that wouldn't be obvious to you, and I really appreciate the guidance.

Whew, thanks for the help, I solved the immediate problem, the hard way. Here's hoping the same problem doesn't pop right back up next time.

Alex

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Delete some music from iPhone, keep all of it in iTunes on Win10 laptop

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