I have been using CopyTrans for over ten years to manage the music on my iPhone. I found in the distant past that iTunes mostly hated me and it would crash/hang/takeforever to do anything and was a complete pain to use when synchronising with my phone. So I move to a free piece of software that did exactly what I wanted CopyTrans. I could upload songs to my phone and edit their details. This worked well because some music I have been buying from Bandcamp rather than through iTunes because the artists get more money. I was still using iTunes to collate all my music on the NAS drive and for the Sonos system. It made sense as it organises the music nicely into directories and allows the creation of playlists. The thing I couldn’t do was synchronise my phone.
All of that changed when I got a better computer. But it has still taken around two years to actually take the plunge and delete the music from my phone and allow iTunes to do its job. There were a couple of things that made me do this. There were two albums which CopyTrans consistently – or maybe my phone – had the wrong artwork even though it was correct in the iTunes library. I really couldn’t figure out how to correct this. I also wanted to synchronise a playlist onto the Sonos system, one I had created on my phone. I took the plunge yesterday and for the first time in over ten years I plugged my phone into the computer and opened iTunes at the same time. I clicked synchronise and left it to do its job.
Three hours later, after transferring around seven thousand songs, it was done and I opened the music app to see what had happened. It had worked! After deleting some albums a second time around I synchronised again and it took a couple of minutes. Well, that is a timeframe I can live with. This makes it a lot easier to buy music and keep all the content nicely aligned over time. I’m quite happy and it feels like a decent achievement. Sad really, but I do feel smug sometimes over music.