Syncing music (esp. playlists) from laptop to iPhone 13
I'm a Windows PC user and an iPhone user since 2008. I have progressively opted for the biggest drive space on each upgrade of iPhone. I currently have an iPhone 13, owned since 2022, and is the first that has a drive - 1tb - larger than the music collection on my computer.
The problem is, I cannot get sync to properly load all of the songs - especially playlists - that I have selected. When I open iTunes on my computer and select the iphone icon, it takes me to the main screen and it "says" I have some 86,000 songs on my phone, which is not true. Sometimes I try to sync and it stays at a smaller number, but still big, like 53,475 songs. But then I look on my phone and 90% of the songs in my playlists are not present. Some playlists don't have any songs, most have just one or two.
I keep trying to sync and sometimes it will add some songs - today it added 1090. But then I tried another sync and the bar showed I had just 5900 songs on there. Keep in mind, this isn't about bragging how many songs I have; I simply want to listen to my playlists, and I haven't been able to do that for a long time.
I'm starting to think I have a corrupt drive. I'm thinking I might try deleting all music from my phone and starting completely over again. As you can imagine, it takes a freaking long time to transfer tens of thousands of files.
I drive a lot for work and never wanted to subscribe to Apple Music or deal with match because I'm often in a no cell or poor cell area and don't want to deal with songs not loading because it can't grab them from the cloud. Besides, I have all this music on my laptop as mp3 files and space on my iphone for them; why is this so difficult?
iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 17