Syncing iTunes library on a new PC

Hello kaikln92,

Thanks for choosing the Apple Support Communities. If we understand correctly, your iTunes library is bigger than expected.

To start, your iPhone cannot send music to your PC. Music can only be synced from the PC to the iPhone. Have you checked your iTunes Library on your PC for duplicates?

Find items and duplicates in iTunes on PC

Give that a try, and let us know if it helps.

Cheers!

Thanks for the response kaikln92,

Once you sync to your new PC for the first time, so long as your iTunes Library is the same as your old PC, it should remove the previous sync and replace it with the songs and playlists you sync on the new PC. Here is a resource that will help with syncing items from iTunes to your iPhone.

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

Cheers!

There is no setting to adjust. If you allow a Sync between a new iTunes Library to a phone with an old iTunes content on it (as you have mentioned), iTunes will delete the existing content from the phone because it can only Sync with one Library. You would have seen a message asking whether this is what you want to happen. If you answered No, the Sync would not have taken place and only the old content would remain on the phone.

Here are some things to check:

• The first thing to do is establish whether the additional storage being taken up is actually playable music. Are there two copies of songs, or can you specifically see (on your iPhone) songs from each of your two libraries? Can you play both songs?
• If there is only one copy of a song (or the content from one Library), are you using iTunes' Capacity Bar to tell you how much storage is being used? Whether you are or not, use it now, to find out how much Other is on your phone
  • Using the screenshot below as your guide*, look at the coloured sections for Audio, Video, Apps and Free, on your phone (by connecting to iTunes and looking at the Summary pane*), as well as smaller additional sections. Don't worry about the very small sections; if Other is large enough, it will probably be in grey and you may need to hover your mouse over the area in order to confirm that's the section you want to look at. How much Other is there?

• Are you actually using Sync? Sync is a specific procedure, carried out by iTunes, which automatically adds, removes and edits songs on the phone. The alternative, is Manually Managing the music (that's the name of the option in iTunes). However, I'm aware that many people refer to manual syncing (even Apple do), but as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as manual sync. If you are dragging music from iTunes to the phone, then you're manually managing the music on the phone, not "manually managing"

Let us know what you find.

* Edited by author, for clarity, after initial posting

Forget about the old PC for now, since you cannot Sync two libraries onto one iPhone and constantly thinking about it will simply mislead you. Deleting music from your old library will simply delete that music from that library. I can't see how it would affect your iPhone, which is synchronised with a different library.

Here's a better idea:

• connect the iPhone to your new iTunes Library and look on the Device/Setting/Music pane
• using the screenshot below as your guide, how many songs are shown next to the Sync Music option (2.)? In theory, it should be the 13708 songs shown in your library. Don't worry if it's a few numbers out.
• then turn off the Sync Music option (2.) as shown in the screenshot below (ignore 1, 3 & 4). That figure (above) should drop to no songs

if you apply the change to your phone and then check the phone itself, there should be no songs on it. What happens in your case? Does it provide you with any clues about where the extra files are coming from?

In theory you could try another Sync, and put back the music you've just removed. What should happen is that you should see the question asking if you wish to remove the existing music from the phone (because, as mentioned, the phone can only be synchronised with one library at a time).

Syncing with just one Library means that you could not use Sync over Wi-Fi from one library and sync via cable connection from another or manually manage from the first library and then sync from the second.

If all else fails, use iTunes to Restore the phone, but be aware that the Restore procedure will remove everything from the phone and then put bac onto it only what is in the current library. I don't have an iPhone, but I think this means that the phone part of your phone is reset too. In other words, if you are going to use Restore, backup the phone first and make sure that backup is sound (good).

Refer to this document Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support for further information.

Try the Sync first though.

Ah! I've just had another thought (and should have thought of this before). This may be a red herring, but your problem calls for out-of-the-box thinking.

Although the storage used figure shown on your iPhone should not include Podcasts, which are listed separately, the capacity bar does:

So the question is: do you have any Podcasts on your phone, in the Apple Podcast app? You may have downloaded them directly from the internet, rather than through iTunes.

Whenever an iPod plays up to the extent that yours appeared to be doing, the first thing to try is a Sync and then, because the Sync procedure does appear to be a bit flaky, a second Sync.

The purpose of the sync is just that - to synchronise the iPod with its library. So if media on the iPod has become corrupted, unreadable, etc. then a sync should correct the issue. Unfortunately, the Sync procedure has suffered for quite a while now, from an inability to fully and correctly sync at the first attempt. Hence my suggestion that you sync twice.

Anyway, glad you've got it sorted out. Now you know what to do if it ever happens again.