Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
I have 63 songs on my iPhone 12 mini (these songs were on my old iPhone XR and were transferred to the iPhone 12 when I restored the iPhone 12 from the iPhone XR backup). I can play the songs with the Music app on the phone, but when I connect the phone to my PC running iTunes, "No items" show up when I look at the music on "my device." How can I see the music that is on my phone with iTunes?
iPhone 12 mini, iOS 15
See Sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod using your computer - Apple Support. If your library is reasonably small you can simply sync all your music to the iPhone. If you need to limit what goes on then you can make a list, e.g. My iPhone Songs, add songs to that list, and set things up so that the single list is selected to sync. You could then look at making smart playlists that, for example, automatically add recent additions to your library. It can be as simple or as complex as you like.
tt2
See Sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod using your computer - Apple Support. If your library is reasonably small you can simply sync all your music to the iPhone. If you need to limit what goes on then you can make a list, e.g. My iPhone Songs, add songs to that list, and set things up so that the single list is selected to sync. You could then look at making smart playlists that, for example, automatically add recent additions to your library. It can be as simple or as complex as you like.
tt2
Thanks for the input. It's been quite a while since I connected my iPhone to iTunes (at least a few years). When I originally put the music on my iPhone XR, I was able to "drag and drop" the songs from my library in iTunes to the iPhone. iTunes also showed all the songs that were stored on the phone. Have iTunes and IOS changed that radically so that this simple method of adding songs to the iPhone is no longer available? Wow, this seems a lot more complicated now.
For reasons that aren't clear Apple only allow an iPhone to be manually managed with a single library. Occasionally an update might mess with the recognition of the current library causing it to be treated like a new library with respect to the device, or you might move your library to a new computer in a way that doesn't preserve this hidden identity. Syncing with selected playlists is a better approach as it allows you to manage what is scheduled to go to the device whether connected or not, and makes it much easier to put back the content if it ever needs to be restored or replaced.
With all that said I don't know why iTunes isn't listing the current content of the iPhone, unless it only has cloud references to songs in your purchase history. Since you cannot see them in iTunes, and iTunes doesn't allow content to be copied from a device to the library, I would try iFunBox and see if you can recover them before attempting to add any new content.
tt2
Thanks again for your help. All the songs that are on my phone are also in my library in iTunes. My original intent was to keep the songs that are on the iPhone and add a few more. Please excuse my ignorance here; I'm not too familiar with playlists. As I mentioned before, I put the songs on my iPhone XR by just dragging and dropping them onto the phone icon in iTunes. If I were to make a playlist with all the songs that are currently on my iPhone and add the songs that I want to add to the iPhone to the playlist and then synced the iPhone to the playlist, would that accomplish what I want to do? I can see the song titles on my phone, so it won't be too hard to make the new playlist. If I do this, do all the songs in the playlist end up in the "songs" folder in the Music app? Also, would all the songs then show up in iTunes when I connect the phone to the PC? I really appreciate your help with this. Is there an article on the Apple site that explains playlists and syncing the iPhone?
See Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device - Apple Community to see if you can copy off those 63 songs with say iFunBox.
tt2
You're welcome. 🙂
tt2
Can't see songs on iPhone with iTunes
