Can't move music from my Mac to my iPhone

Has anyone found a way to get music onto an iPhone?

Even the old style sync version suggested in the top answer does not work if you just want to add a few songs to an existing iPhone, because if you sync, it will want to erase everything already on the iPhone and replace with just the few songs you want to add.

Is there no way I can add a few songs to an iPhone? These songs are fully owned by me, they are not purchased from Apple. I do not want to erase the thousands of songs already on the iPhone (these existing songs are not on my computer)

SilverdaleJB wrote:

When I turn off my music in iCloud on my iPhone, I get this screen when I open Music, even though I had all my music on my phone:

If you had the Sync Library feature turned on, you probably didn't have all of your music on your phone. My guess is that you had iCloud Music Library copies.

Turning the feature off could have caused the removal of those copies. So now your phone's Music library is empty, but assuming that you did not delete your original imported songs from your Mac's Music Library, you should now be able to use the Finder to synchronize the iPhone with the Mac.

That will populate the iPhone's Music Library with copies of your songs rather than with copies of matching songs from Apple's { iTunes Store / Apple Music subscription } database.

SilverdaleJB Said:

"Can't move music from my Mac to my iPhone: When I try to use Finder to access the files on my phone, I see the following:"

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Thank you for the screenshot.

Accessing Music Between Devices:

You need to have an Apple Music subscription to access home music in the Music app (or iTunes) on all of your devices. Go here: Subscribe to Apple Music on iPhone - Apple Support

Do you subscribe to iTunes Match? Or to Apple Music – with the Sync feature turned on? I suspect that one of these is true. That would explain the message. The Mac is set up to avoid doing any manual Finder-to-iPhone music synchronization as long as automatic synchronization is going on.

My iPhone contains music from my CDs (loaded via iTunes) and also has access to my Apple Music subscription. Maybe if I subscribed to iTunes Match, or turned on the Sync feature of Apple Music, I'd get a message similar to the one that you saw. But I'm not going to turn on those features to test the hypothesis.

The message suggests how you can use the Finder to load music from your CDs once more: "To sync music from this Mac, turn off iCloud Music Library."

SilverdaleJB wrote:

TheLittles: Why should i have to pay a subscription fee to move music i own between my Mac and my iPhone? That makes no sense. The whole reason for using Apple computers and other devices used to be so that they would integrate seemlessly with each other. Now you are saying I have to pay to do that?

SilverdaleJB,

You don't have to pay a subscription fee to move your own music from your Mac to your iPhone. You can use old-style, direct computer-> iPhone synchronization (based on the original computer -> iPod model).

That involves connecting an iPhone to your computer and doing synchronization with iTunes – or the Finder. This synchronization is [mostly] one-way, from the computer to the iPhone, and you update one iPhone at a time. It is a purely local synchronization that does not involve use of Apple's server space, Apple's network connections, or files in their music library, except perhaps to check DRM authorizations (on media items that have DRM, such as TV show and movie files).

iTunes Match and the Sync feature of Apple Music do involve use of Apple's servers and network connections. They're giving you a "match" feature where Apple tries to find songs in their database that "match" yours – on the basis that their versions might have higher bit rates, or might have been encoded better, than yours. They are also making your songs available to all of your devices in a more automatic way than regular iTunes/Finder synchronization does.

Whether you want the "match" functionality, or not (I don't), that's one difference that might explain why Apple charges for it.

the answer is not here anywhere.I had to figure it out on my own as I learned apple music . no more itunes . in finder go to - Macintosh HD /users / your computer name / music / music /media /automatically add to music . copy your own music in there .It will show up in apple music under songs shortly and disappear from that folder . Isn't that sketchy? then -select all -right clic- and select- add to device- if apple music sees the device . sometimes have to replug a few times-sketchy again . howd I figure that out? ask spock! it will work if you keep trying .

the answer is not here anywhere.I had to figure it out on my own as I learned apple music . no more itunes . in finder go to - Macintosh HD /users / your computer name / music / music /media /automatically add to music . copy your own music in there .It will show up in apple music under songs shortly and disappear from that folder . Isn't that sketchy? then -select all -right clic- and select- add to device- if apple music sees the device . sometimes have to replug a few times-sketchy again . howd I figure that out? ask spock! it will work if you keep trying .