Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's talk about manually managing your music and videos on your iOS
devices.
A lot of people get frustrated when trying to figure out how to get specific music and
movies from their Mac to their iOS device.
The reason for this is because if you use the standard sync things you have to set certain
pieces of media, certain music albums, certain movies to sync over.
If you want to change what is on there you basically have to change these sync settings
and sync them again.
Which is kind of counter to how you are used to using things like Finder where you just
basically drag and drop a file from one location to another.
You would like to just drag and drop a file from your Mac over to your iOS device.
Well you can do that but you have to set it up right.
So let's look here in iTunes.
Here is my music collection and you can see I have an iPad connected here.
Now I could just click there and go to the iPad settings.
But it is going to be a lot easier to do all this if we show Sidebar.
So I'm going to View Sidebar and now I can see my iPad and also little categories here
for Music and Movies.
If you don't see those just open it up like that.
So I can see what music is on it and it is nothing.
Now let's look at the iPad itself and look at the summary information.
We can see here that I have checked Manually manage music and videos.
Now this is the key part.
If I were to turn that off then I could go into Music, I can Sync Music, and I can see
my entire library or selected playlists and I can set up exactly what I want to sync to
it, like just a few artists.
If I want to change what's on there, like add some songs, I have to go to this screen
again and I have to customize it.
Maybe adding albums, adding genres, adding artists.
Maybe I have to add a playlist and then take the songs that I want and actually put them
in that playlist so then it syncs to my iPad there.
The same is kind of the same for Movies.
I can sync movies and I have to select which movies I want to sync.
But if I just turn those off and don't have it do the syncing of music and movies, go
to Summary and turn on Manually manage, now I've got something that is a lot easier to
deal with.
Let me show you.
Now all I need to do to put music on here is go to my library here, this is my library
on my Mac, and choose a song.
Any song I want.
So I will choose a song here and I will drag it to the iPad.
You can see that I can do that.
I can't do that if I have manually syncing turned off.
But I do that here and it is going to sync to it.
You can see it is actually going to update the files on the iPad right there.
It is going to put it right on the iPad.
It is not even going to wait for the next sync.
If I go to the iPad under Music you can see right here what songs I have on it.
I can actually select it, hit the delete key, and I can remove it right there.
So I can manage it on a song by song basis pulling one song from my music library in
here and deleting them manually.
Now the same is true for movies.
I can look at movies here.
I have no movies.
So can go to movies on my Mac and drag this in and it will then add that movie file directly
to the iPad.
I can click in here and see that it has been added.
So I can see what music and movies I've got.
I can delete them and I can drag and drop new ones there.
Here is something that is pretty cool.
I don't even have to have the file in my iTunes library to do this.
I can go to the Finder here.
I've got a Finder window with some video in it.
I can drag and drop that video right into the iPad and its not going to add it to my
iTunes collection.
It is just going to add it directly from the Finder to the iPad and you can see it loading
it up there.
So it is a way to skip having video files in iTunes in order to get them to your iOS
device.
You can do the same thing for music.
I can go to the Finder here.
There is a MP3 file and I can drag and drop that directly in here.
I can also drag it down here.
Notice both places are valid places to drop it and it will sync the new file directly
there without ever adding it to my iTunes library.
But perhaps the coolest thing about manually moving files to and from your iPad this way
is that you can do it from more than one Mac.
So take this situation.
You sync your iPhone with your computer, your desktop computer, and you fill it up with
music.
Then you go on a trip and while you are on the trip you realize on your MacBook that
you are traveling with, you have some music on there that you would like to put on your
iPhone so you can listen to it.
Well there would be no way to sync it over to your iPhone because your iPhone is set
to sync music with your desktop computer at home.
But if you manually manage music and videos now you can connect your iPhone to your MacBook,
which is not usually synced with, and you can drag and drop that music onto your iPhone,
adding it to what is on your iPhone, without erasing all the music that is on your iPhone.
So manually managing music and videos has three big advantages.
One, you have better fine tune control over exactly what media gets onto your iOS device.
Two, you can put stuff on there without it first having to be in iTunes.
Three, you can then put something from another Mac, say your portable Mac as opposed to your
desktop Mac, onto the iOS device without having to erase all the media and resync it.
I hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.