Do you still use iTunes to manage your media on your iOS device or have you cut the cord?

[mbeader@mchsi.com]

I use it because I don't have enough storage on the Cloud for my 64 GB phone....

 

[NolansVlogs]

(Maybe duplicate post. If so, sorry) My niece introduced me to the PhotoSync app, and I really love it. There is also a matching program for MAc and PC. Finally! A way to transfer without Apple OS at all!

You need the cord to charge the device (;


NolansVlogs

 

[williamsbh76]

Only to do a full back once a month or to do an update for jailbreak purposes.

 

[nolhayes]

I completely agree and would like to add that

only people who don't add a lot of media to their device (8gb and 16gb phones etc) and people with small iTunes libraries can really benefit from cutting the cord.
My library is very large 100+ movies, 15k+ songs, my experience is that filling an iPod or iPad up over wifi is slow.

 

[Derrick4Real]

Curious to know how many of you still have not cut the cord from your computer and still manage your media on your iOS device via iTunes from your computer? The day iTunes match went live along with iCloud I have not plugged any iOS device into my computer.

I currently have a lifetime of ripped music, about 150 gigabites of mp3s, stored on a hard drive. I use it for streaming to my home stereo, playing through itunes when sitting at my desk, and i drag and drop music back and forth between my nano for excercising and my 80 gb ipod used sporatically now, and my 64gb iphone. Point is i don't really have a desire to cut off my computer. Itunes match costs money so i have about 19k songs in google music instead, but that's not my whole collection, which includes many things not commercially available anyways. Google also has song matching free not too. So Itunes match is a nonstarter as a solution for me. Money doesn't grow on trees for me so every little savings matter. Especially coming out of a recession.

I actually love the look of itunes, but the sluggishness of using it with a larger external drive and on windows leaves a ton to be desired. I'd rather itunes fix the myriad of silly stuff it does because it thinks i'm stupid. For example, it should be able to monitor the content in my music folder on my external drive for changes like winamp could in 1999. this library mess is annoying. i constantly cull my collection, add new songs etc and it's so cumbersome to save a file to the folder then have to go find the song in the directory, open itunes and manually drag it into itunes. It should simply rescan in the background automatically. As for syncing, i have too much music to simply sync even with 80gb ipods and 64 gb iphones. to simply hit sync and be done. I need overhead for games, videos, images, apps as well. But i'm still copying 48GBs of music onto my phone. So another issue itunes, when syncing things like apps loves occasionally tell you if you continue it will delete all your apps on a phone. Wtf? why would i want to do that? If i wanted to delete all that stuff i'd have deleted it. It doesn't even give an option. I find it very confusing and needlessly apple typical confusing handholding. Aside from being slow as molasses there are other small things but aside from those issues i still play music at my desk with itunes and thus like local copies. Oh i got tons of playlists on my desktop i manage.

Additionally, I don't trust "the cloud" as a backup. I have all my digital media backed up on discs or other hard drives. Especially when i hear of stories of itunes match/google match swapping out songs with curse words for radio friendly crap versions. Quite an issue if you're like me and spent a life accumulating 60gb or 70 GBs of uncut hip-hop. no self respecting hip-hop head purposefully buys radio versions. So i know that all my stuff is tagged properly, backed up properly, and i'm getting the correct versions of songs.

Also music are not the only media i manage in itunes, i have audiobooks, a few videos, and all my ebooks. And that doesn't touch the roughly 1.5 terabytes of movies i've got on my external drive. I don't add those to my iphone but i would add some if i had and ipad and was traveling. In fact i have added tv shows to my iphone for traveling. And as for audiobooks once i'm done listening i delete them and add another so i'm constantly changing the content on my phone.

Oh another major issue is I don't don't have a consistent 3g data signal. I got sprint which is already suspect, but i live in an area near where the geography has several pockets of dead data reception. No data means no consistent streaming. Also there are many many businesses that i go into and if you don't stand by the front door the reception dies indoors. Like my local Best Buy. If you go to the back of the store and you're streaming tunein radio it goes dead. That's enough right there to have most of my stuff local. but living off of itunes match isn't gonna happen or any other similar service. In fact i use Google Music largely for when i just have to hear a song and face the sad realization that it's one of the many not actually on my phone. But it's not at all my main source of music or how i manage music typically.

Another point is i'm not locked into to buying media through apple or itunes. In fact i've never bought any thing from them except 4 apps. I use pcs though i'm switching to a mac. But i don't buy tv, movies, music, books or anything from apple so many of their services don't offer me much other than another alternative store.

 

[Jeremy]

I completely agree and would like to add that

only people who don't add a lot of media to their device (8gb and 16gb phones etc) and people with small iTunes libraries can really benefit from cutting the cord.
My library is very large 100+ movies, 15k+ songs, my experience is that filling an iPod or iPad up over wifi is slow.

I disagree. If you purchase movies via iTunes like myself and use iTunes match there is no need to connect to a computer.

 

[EauRouge]

just for music

 

[henrymagnusrex]

Yeah, after match went live I did the same thing. I've got a massive movie library, lots of ebooks, pictures, documents etc. I still have to manage my music and playlists in iTunes, but I never have to plug in or even sync over wifi.

Between iTunes match, iCloud backup, airvideo, and my pogoplug (which is basically the giant file server for my pictures, books, magazines, documents etc.) I have no reason to plug in or ever sync through iTunes. And I can get at all my stuff from anywhere, so I don't have to worry about whether I need to sync something or not.

 

[Derrick4Real]

seems to me there's some common themes:

people that buy music on itunes and/or have small libraries have a much easier time doing as the original poster.

by constrast i've never bought media from apple. I'm not tied to their system that much. I Have a large library, And i'm not paying Apple for 150 gbs of itunes matching.

I think it really matters how you get your media cause if you're not buying from apple it's costs.

 

[Sean Randomson]

I certainly don't use iTunes. It's a performance hog and I have iCloud backing up whenever it can. I'm good.

 

[Just_Me_D]

Re: Do you still use iTunes to manage your media on your iOS device or have you cut

Every once in a while I'll do manual backup in iTunes like before a major iOS upgrade. But I never use it to transfer music or sync the phone. ...(snipped)...

Ditto....

 

[Adnams]

Re: Do you still use iTunes to manage your media on your iOS device or have you cut

Still relatively new to all this, but to me it's not a hardship to plug my phone in and let it back up in iTunes while I'm doing something else on the computer. iCloud has remained switched off since the day my iPhone came out of its box.

 

[Highrisedrifter]

Re: Do you still use iTunes to manage your media on your iOS device or have you cut

My media collection is huge. I have transferred all my CDs and DVDs to my computer so I can watch them on any TV in the house or on my iPad courtesy of streaming players. I have over 2Tb of movies and about 300 Gb of music so there is no way it will all fit on my phone. I don't use iTunes for music as the one time I made the mistake of trying to sync everything, it would have taken me literally days (and iTunes, in its infinite wisdom 'default setting' wanted to move my media to my root SSD drive which is only 256Gb, rather than leaving it on my RAID array). I use CopyTrans for everything that isn't either syncing for apps.podcasts or backing up/restoring.

 

[gordol]

I tether both my iPhone and iPad for syncing media (music on the phone, photos on the tablet) simply because it's faster than WiFi. And, now that I was bitten in the ass by a 700mb universal app I wanted to install on the iPad continuously stalling on download to the iPhone, I've turned that feature OFF on both devices and any app that gets installed on both will be done manually, and probably wired to iTunes.

My contacts and calendars are synced wirelessle (to Google).