I recently restored and updated my phone and updated my mac (iOS 13.1.5 MacOS 10.15.5) and am having trouble managing my music on my phone. My music collection is spread over several external drives and amounts to several TB of mp3s and m4a files spanning several genres that I have ripped from all sorts of media. Unfortunately, it seems that the music app does not allow me to just drag albums or groups of albums to specific playlists on my phone. Because of the variety of music/sound files, I tend to shift out a few GB of audio files on my phone every week, so that I am not always listening to the same stuff. Dumping a bunch of albums onto the phone, then having to sort through them on the phone to add to playlists can be quite difficult when there are so many other audio files already there. This is further exacerbated because not all of my audio files are fully tagged with metadata (especially my field recordings). Is there a way to still bulk add files from the computer to specific phone playlists (or is there a change planned for OS 14 to deal with this?)
Honestly, the flexibility offered by iTunes for music management was one of the deciding factors in my decision to get an iPhone to begin with, and this loss of such a critical function is unfathomable. Much of what I listen to (field recordings or esoteric music) is not available on streaming platforms.
Right now, I am adding links for all my audio files to the music app on my laptop and presorting them into laptop playlists, then creating phone playlists that I move things in and out of. Not only is this unwieldy, but it gets really frustrating when some of the external drives are not connected, as those files show up as missing in the app.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer me suggestions that might help. I am even considering 3rd party apps, but don't know of any that can do this either.
Edit: I just discovered the third party app iMazing and it looks like it will work, though I am still really peeved at Apple for weakening the desktop music app as much as they did. Making things user friendly is one thing, but making things less functional to make them simpler is not good design.
Honestly, the flexibility offered by iTunes for music management was one of the deciding factors in my decision to get an iPhone to begin with, and this loss of such a critical function is unfathomable. Much of what I listen to (field recordings or esoteric music) is not available on streaming platforms.
Right now, I am adding links for all my audio files to the music app on my laptop and presorting them into laptop playlists, then creating phone playlists that I move things in and out of. Not only is this unwieldy, but it gets really frustrating when some of the external drives are not connected, as those files show up as missing in the app.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer me suggestions that might help. I am even considering 3rd party apps, but don't know of any that can do this either.
Edit: I just discovered the third party app iMazing and it looks like it will work, though I am still really peeved at Apple for weakening the desktop music app as much as they did. Making things user friendly is one thing, but making things less functional to make them simpler is not good design.
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