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How to transfer my apple music songs from my iPhone 6 onto my new Macbook Pro

Hey guys, new user here and i was just wondering why not all of my songs transferred onto my new macbook pro. Out of the around 1000 songs i have only 200 copied over. Those seem to be the purchases i've made on iTunes but all my cds and apple music purchases didn't transfer over. The kicker is that when i first started the transfer process, all songs did show up but those 800 other songs were greyed out, but the next day i opened up iTunes on my computer they were gone. Any help is appreciated thank you

MacBook Pro with Retina display, iOS 8.4.1

Posted on Aug 26, 2015 3:05 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Aug 28, 2015 6:40 AM

Hello Erik,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities and congratulations on your new MacBook Pro. I understand that you are trying to get some music that is on your iPhone on to your computer. That is something that I can help you out with.
The first thing I want to point out is that when you try to transfer items that have been downloaded from the App or iTunes Store's, that content is the only content that moves over. This would be the reason why only the purchased content from iTunes was downloaded. Take a look at the first article for more details about transferring purchases.
Redownload or transfer your iTunes Store purchases from an iPhone, iPad or iPod to a computer
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201267

If you are using Apple Music and have iCloud Music Library enabled on your iPhone, then I would recommend checking is the iCloud Music Library settings in iTunes. With that enabled, you will be able to keep your library in sync without plugging in your iPhone to your computer all the time. Check out the second article for the steps to make sure iCloud Music Library is enabled.
Check your Apple Music library settings
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926

The final suggestion would be to copy the music from your old computer to your new Mac. If you still have access to it, you can use the steps outlined in the third article to copy all the content over with ease with an external hard drive.
How to move your iTunes library to a new computer
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204318

Have a great day

4 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Aug 28, 2015 6:40 AM in response to Erik Lubby

Hello Erik,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities and congratulations on your new MacBook Pro. I understand that you are trying to get some music that is on your iPhone on to your computer. That is something that I can help you out with.
The first thing I want to point out is that when you try to transfer items that have been downloaded from the App or iTunes Store's, that content is the only content that moves over. This would be the reason why only the purchased content from iTunes was downloaded. Take a look at the first article for more details about transferring purchases.
Redownload or transfer your iTunes Store purchases from an iPhone, iPad or iPod to a computer
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201267

If you are using Apple Music and have iCloud Music Library enabled on your iPhone, then I would recommend checking is the iCloud Music Library settings in iTunes. With that enabled, you will be able to keep your library in sync without plugging in your iPhone to your computer all the time. Check out the second article for the steps to make sure iCloud Music Library is enabled.
Check your Apple Music library settings
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926

The final suggestion would be to copy the music from your old computer to your new Mac. If you still have access to it, you can use the steps outlined in the third article to copy all the content over with ease with an external hard drive.
How to move your iTunes library to a new computer
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204318

Have a great day

Aug 28, 2015 6:48 AM in response to Erik Lubby

Your i-device was not designed for unique storage of your media. It is not a backup device and media transfer was planned with you maintaining a master copy of your media on a computer which is itself independently backed up against loss. To use a device with a different setup you transfer the old library from a computer or a backup directly to the new setup, not the device to the library. Media syncing is one way, computer to device, updating the device content to the content on the computer, not updating or restoring content on a computer. The exception is iTunes Store purchases which can be transferred to a computer.


iTunes Store: Transferring purchases from your iOS device or iPod to a computer - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1848 - only purchases from iTunes Store


For transferring other items from an i-device to a computer you will have to use third party commercial software. See this document by turingtest2: Recovering your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device - https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3991 Even this method may not fully recover what you had in the library originally. For example, if you had converted music files to a lower bitrate, or photos to a lower resolution, in order to save space it is those lower quality files you will recover.


The best solution, as indicated in another post, is to transfer the entire library intact from the old computer to the new one.

Aug 28, 2015 11:30 AM in response to norm123

Wow thank you so much, yeah all i had to do was turn on the iCloud music library on my macbook and boom everything transferred cds, apple music, etc. Thank you again and for responding so quickly. I do have another question though, so it looks like some songs are greyed out and I've looked up that term but i couldn't really find a solution for that. Do you know how i could get those songs to work.

How to transfer my apple music songs from my iPhone 6 onto my new Macbook Pro

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