How to download songs back to iPhone after iOS restore?

I have a similar issue. Replacement iPhone, plus iPad, all music “synched” by iTunes (as has been working for years).

During the transfer process, the new phone seems to have copied all the music files across, but not actually put them in context of the Music app. Thus, I appeared to have 25GB of “music” PLUS 25GB of “synced content”. I have turned off full music library syncing to the phone, done a full three-way synch and then re-enabled some music syncing on the phone. It *seems* now to have reduced the storage problem BUT in the iPhone Music list of Albums (or Artists) it still shows ALL of my library entries. Why are they still there? And how?

Ideally, I’d like my PC-based iTunes library to be the master and both the iPad and iPhone music libraries to be customisable to be totally controlled from there - but Apple seems to be making this ever-more complicated, what with the confusingly-named “Apple Music” service, plus the interference of iCloud.

Is there a simple way to make this happen?

thanks

Thanks for the thoughtful response, Forrest.

My library also is a hybrid collection of ripped CDs, iTunes purchases and the odd self-recorded MP3, with a fairly small number of playlists spanning these. The master copy has always been in iTunes on my Windows PC, with syncs to iPad, iPhone and trusty old iPod nano.

I was wondering about the role of iCloud, since Music appears in the list of possible Apps “using iCloud”. I’ve turned this off on both devices, but if turned on does it transfer metadata (such as album/artist lists, and even playlists) if the music itself is never stored there? I’m not interested in using iCloud as a backup mechanism, but do also use the backup facilities of iTunes for both devices. NB though, my old phone has now disappeared from the device list on iTunes, so I suspect that I may have lost access to the old backups there. Thus, if there was some sort of corrupted transfer, I’ve only got backups of the compromised new phone library.

I agree though that more functional control would be great. I’m a bit nervous that, if I try and clean up the new phone too much, a subsequent sync might replicate some deletions back to iTunes (and then on to the iPad and nano), even though I’m *just* trying to clean up the phone (just as happened to you with iCloud). A “one-way sync” option (or “delete entire music library on the phone and rebuild using iTunes sync”) would be a great addition to make this easier.

As you say, other voices would be useful to chip in here…. I’ll keep experimenting meanwhile.