Problems with tracks on my iPhone transferred from my Mac

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Level 1

8 points

Problems with tracks on my iPhone transferred from my Mac

I have always kept my music library on my Mac and synced to my iPhone. Right now I have a 2023 14" MacBook Pro and an iPhone Xr. For many years no matter what Mac I had and what iPhone I synced to, on a regular basis some songs on my iPhone would not play 100% correctly, sounding like the file itself on the iPhone was corrupted. When I go back to my Mac and play the song, it plays perfectly.

Another problem is that often even though I've added only a few songs and/or changed the info for a track or few on my Mac, when I sync to my iPhone, hundreds and sometimes thousands of songs are copied to my iPhone. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Has anyone else had similar problems with syncing music from a Mac to an iPhone?

If so, have you figured out a solution besides erasing all the songs on the iPhone and resyncing?

Thanks in advance!

iPhone 6s, iOS 14

Posted on Aug 11, 2023 5:32 PM

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Answer 1

Ali_E1

Community Specialist

Aug 13, 2023 5:25 PM in response to melzie

Hi melzie,

Thank you for showing us the screenshot. When you have "Entire music library" selected, the entire iTunes Music Library on your Mac will overwrite the music library on your iPhone every time you sync your iPhone.

If you go back to the General tab, you should be able to select "Manually manage music, movies, and TV shows" and manually drag and drop only the files you change from your music library to your iPhone in the sidebar to sync. This will keep your iPhone from automatically re-syncing everything on your Mac.

This article has great visuals and will help with manually dragging and dropping content:

Manually manage content on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using your Mac - Apple Support

We'd like to learn more about the quality of the music on your iPhone. You mentioned they didn't sound quite right. What exactly seems to be the difference between listening on your iPhone and your Mac?

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards.

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Answer 2

ManJor

Community Specialist

Aug 12, 2023 12:56 PM in response to melzie

Welcome melzie,

This is something we can definitely assist you with, thanks for posting here.

When it comes to syncing, it sounds like you may be selecting only those certain songs that you'd like to be updated but you may not have marked "Selected playlist, artists, albums, and genres" before hitting the sync button. That would explain why you're seeing more songs syncing over than expected.This article goes into more detail on how that works: Sync music between your Mac and iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support

For songs that aren't sounding quite right, you can try syncing them back to your iPhone using the information in the article we shared above to see if that may resolve things.

Thank you for being a part of the community here. We hope this information helps!

Best wishes.

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Answer 3

melzie Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 13, 2023 5:08 PM in response to ManJor

I'm syncing the entire library as shown below. As you also see there is no song selection and all my songs are selected within iTunes so that's not the issue. Since most of a track's info is kept in the library file, not the music file, changes in that shouldn't prompt the file to become recopied. Even if it did, I certainly haven't edited the song info for anywhere as near as many songs that are recopied! I'll use my iPhone to change the rating of a track but when I sync the tracks with updated info is not recopied to my Mac, only the library file is updated. Syncing to me means only when the file has changed should it need to be copied. So the copying of thousands of tracks is still unexplained.

As for songs that aren't sounding quite right, what caused that? That shouldn't happen and I shouldn't have to fix that by resyncing. What happened to old Apple slogan "it just works!"

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Problems with tracks on my iPhone transferred from my Mac

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