iphone 5 music storage

KathyA

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While downloading music from itunes, I now have 1,455 songs but my phone tells me I do not have enought storage for everything and to change my storage plan, I went in and purchased $100 worth of storage and now it tells me I have 55 GB total and available 54.6 GB at the moment. I just went to download more music and it told me again that I do not have enough storage, am I missing something? if I have 54.6 GB of storage what's the deal?
 

SnapThrow

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but my phone tells me I do not have enough storage for everything and to change my storage plan,

You say "storage plan" -- I may be nitpicking here but that verbiage sounds like a cloud service or something similar. iTunes music that is synced to your iPhone is stored on the iPhone, if you use iTunes Match you stream your music from your Match library. iCloud has 5GB of free memory available to you for syncing and backup. How much memory does your iPhone have-- 16GB, 32GB or 64GB? There is no "plan" for the amount of memory you buy with your iPhone, and based on your "55GB" wording it seems like you may have the 64GB iPhone. How much space is music taking up? Look in settings/general/usage.

Need more details or clarify your question
 

Alli

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Actually, even if you use iTunes Match, you must download the music to your iPhone. You can only stream to your Mac.
 

anon(4698833)

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This scenario is EXACTLY why people should not throw money at things before they understand what they are buying and/or doing. What you essentially did is bought a $100 backup that has nothing to do with streaming music to your iPhone. Like Alli said, you have to actually download the music to your iPhone in order to play the cloud stored music on it or through it...which essentially falls under the storage capacity of the phone itself, and not the amount of cloud storage you have.

You gotta do the research and understand this stuff or you're going to buy stuff you'll probably never properly use.
 

gordol

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While downloading music from itunes, I now have 1,455 songs but my phone tells me I do not have enought storage for everything and to change my storage plan, I went in and purchased $100 worth of storage and now it tells me I have 55 GB total and available 54.6 GB at the moment. I just went to download more music and it told me again that I do not have enough storage, am I missing something? if I have 54.6 GB of storage what's the deal?
The device has a finite amount of storage space which is somewhat less than the listed capacity (8, 16, 32 or 64GB depending on the specific model phone you got) (the firmware itself takes up some of that capacity). There is nothing you can do to increase this capacity, all you can do is adjust what you have on the phone. As others have already noted, what you grossly overpaid for with that $100 is some kind of online storage which is most likely for backups or streaming.

What you want to do is use Smart Playlists in iTunes to manage what gets cycled on and off your iPhone. I've got over 60GB of music, and a 16GB iPhone that also needs to carry some photos, apps and their data, and still have some space free. Using Smart Playlists (which can be nested, by the way) with set size limits, iTunes automatically moves music onto and off my iPhone according to the last-played date and current ratings of the individual items.

Another way to be able to put more music onto the phone is to set iTunes to re-sample down higher quality tracks that go onto the phone. This does not effect the music on your computer, just the copies on the phone. If a lot of your music is at a sample rate higher than 128kB, you will probably see a significant increase in how much can fit on the phone.
 

zerog46

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Not to change the subject touch but since when can't we stream iTunes on our iPhones, unless I misunderstood. But unjust tried playing a song from the cloud and it worked fine.
 

Alli

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Not to change the subject touch but since when can't we stream iTunes on our iPhones, unless I misunderstood. But unjust tried playing a song from the cloud and it worked fine.

Notice that the song is now on your iPhone and no longer just in the cloud?
 

zerog46

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And I'm not trying to start an argument just wondering. And I just check it and downloaded the song. So technically shouldn't it be in there twice now?
 

SnapThrow

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Nope. It's on your phone. Yes the cloud symbol still shows up on the song, but if you check your app storage usage before and after you click on a cloud song it will have gone up.

Interesting that the cloud symbol shows after I play a song indicating that it is indeed in the cloud and not in my device, and I can still touch the cloud symbol to download the song. Also, I have played a bunch of cloud Match songs and nothing shows in the music area of taking up space. I know Match used to download songs when you played them but I thought that changed w iOS 6. I'm not sure it is as cut/dry as you think... I'm confused now though
 

anon(4698833)

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I'm also kind of confused about this iTunes match thing...it does not appear that the song actually downloaded to my iPhone, but it did play when it was selected. Did they change the way this worked? Because as i remember, exactly like Alli said, it essentially saved a non-working copy in the cloud and then when you selected it, it actually loaded it to your iPhone (and not just streamed it like it seems to do now).

Weird...
 

Tanbam

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I'm also kind of confused about this iTunes match thing...it does not appear that the song actually downloaded to my iPhone, but it did play when it was selected. Did they change the way this worked? Because as i remember, exactly like Alli said, it essentially saved a non-working copy in the cloud and then when you selected it, it actually loaded it to your iPhone (and not just streamed it like it seems to do now).

Weird...

The songs are downloaded both ways, but there are two different ways that the song is flagged for long-term storage on the phone. All iCloud match music is downloaded onto the phone, but how long it stays there is related to how it was downloaded.

If you simply play the song, it will be flagged as semi-temporary so that the IOS is free to delete it if storage starts getting tight.

If you "download" the song, it is flagged so that it doesn't ever get to the head of the normal delete queue. It may still eventually be deleted if you run out of room, but all of the "non-downloaded" music will be deleted first.
 

anon(4698833)

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Interesting...and I've recently taken A LOT of pictures, so my storage capacity is under 1GB so that may be why it didn't stick around. I rarely use it so it's not a huge deal but i was curious, thanks for the info!
 

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