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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

Posted on Aug 17, 2024 1:36 PM

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4 replies

Aug 17, 2024 2:08 PM in response to livemeyer

I decided to just as I thought, I got into settings->storage->music and deleted all of the music files. Then I went in and manually deleted every one of the 50 or so (empty) playlists that were listed. I rebooted my phone, then connected it to sync. According to iTunes, I have 103723 songs from 12199 artists. When I connected my phone, the sync bar at the bottom indicated 59358 files to go onto my phone. I ran the sync. It didn't transfer any music, at least based on looking at the music app on my phone. The sync bar dropped from 59358 to...14. So, I have 14 ghost files on my phone. Will try another sync, because I'm out of ideas.

Aug 18, 2024 11:00 AM in response to livemeyer

So today is a new day, and I attempted another sync between my laptop and phone. It did all the normal steps and when it went to transfer songs, it blipped quickly through maybe two files so quickly that I couldn't even see what they were. But no new songs were added. So I tried again, and the process repeated, exactly the same.


I think I'm just going to get a new phone.

Syncing music (esp. playlists) from laptop to iPhone 13

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