Apple Best iTunes Alternative for Syncing Music onto iPhone?

[Latiken]

Here I am once again.

Alright. So yesterday I was going to sync a couple of songs to my iPhones library. But when I added them, it deleted all my music. So I did the common sense thing, and synced all the music once again. But this time, it has all the songs but I can only play like twelve of them. The rest appear gray on my phone. So I deleted them and am stuck with no music.

I'm done using iTunes for my music. And now my question(s) are this:
What happened to all my music?
What are the best iTunes alternatives?
Do you even like or use iTunes?

Piece of shit iTunes.

 

[FAST6191]

Are the tracks DRM free ones or not? If DRM encumbered then likely a mixup between what it authorised and what is not. If not DRM encumbered then one of the other stunningly sensible ideas employed by idevices is not to read off the FAT filesystem like every other fool but have a database to read from which has a habit of getting kind of corrupted in situations like this- probably something there. For the former correct authorisation and for the latter I usually say format and use what I am about to discuss but you can probably get something sorted there.

2. I try not to have idevices in my life but when dealing with such things for clients it is a 50/50 split between either mediamonkey ( http://www.mediamonkey.com/download/ ) or just plain winamp ( http://www.winamp.com/ ). I was never the greatest fan of winamp (absolutely respect its place in history and what it did, still do not care for it) so I tend not to go there and mediamonkey goes a long way to making idevices acceptable media players the way I like to use technology.

3. Keep that nonsense away from my systems, indeed I think I would rather I come back and find someone gave me one of that fake AV programs to fight. If I must have it (and where the mediamonkey/winamp stuff handily surpasses itunes and keeps on going for adding music and such like they fall short when it comes to the restore functions- which is typically when I get called in to do something) then it goes on sacrifice laptop, a spare partition or on a VM (a XP/straight 32 bit windows 7 capable virtual machine runs on almost anything and virtualbox has great USB passthrough abilities).

 

[Latiken]

Are the tracks DRM free ones or not? If DRM encumbered then likely a mixup between what it authorised and what is not. If not DRM encumbered then one of the other stunningly sensible ideas employed by idevices is not to read off the FAT filesystem like every other fool but have a database to read from which has a habit of getting kind of corrupted in situations like this- probably something there. For the former correct authorisation and for the latter I usually say format and use what I am about to discuss but you can probably get something sorted there.

2. I try not to have idevices in my life but when dealing with such things for clients it is a 50/50 split between either mediamonkey ( http://www.mediamonkey.com/download/ ) or just plain winamp ( http://www.winamp.com/ ). I was never the greatest fan of winamp (absolutely respect its place in history and what it did, still do not care for it) so I tend not to go there and mediamonkey goes a long way to making idevices acceptable media players the way I like to use technology.

3. Keep that nonsense away from my systems, indeed I think I would rather I come back and find someone gave me one of that fake AV programs to fight. If I must have it (and where the mediamonkey/winamp stuff handily surpasses itunes and keeps on going for adding music and such like they fall short when it comes to the restore functions- which is typically when I get called in to do something) then it goes on sacrifice laptop, a spare partition or on a VM (a XP/straight 32 bit windows 7 capable virtual machine runs on almost anything and virtualbox has great USB passthrough abilities).

I actually have no idea whether the songs I have are DRM free or what. They were read on my device before. I guess iTunes decided to completely fuck up all my music. So you recommend media monkey? Alright I'll give a try. Thanks.

 

[Izen]

If the songs are greyed out in the Music app, that means they were set to be Synced to the device, but never were. At least that's what it's supposed to mean. It never hurts to try a fresh Sync.

If you bought your music from iTunes or any other major online provider, then they have DRM. If not (i.e. you "found" them on the internet), then the songs shouldn't have any sort of protection whatsoever. I am not sure about purchasing physical CDs and ripping the music from them, though. Putting DRM onto physical CDs seems like easily the most pointless and arbitrary act anyone could make. If a pirate wants to upload the songs, they have ways to easily crack or circumvent the DRM. Easily. [I don't really expect the music industry to understand that DRM is pretty much the same thing as the War on Drugs, just on a different scale. Where the War on Drugs introduced hundreds of thousands to drugs they would have otherwise never encountered, DRM'd music doesn't affect people nearly as heavily and only turns a few hundred or thousand otherwise repeat-customers to piracy. But let me hop down off my soapbox and stop pulling numbers out of my ass.]

I, personally, have never had any problems with iTunes and music. I know that if my iPhone or iPad is Synced with another iTunes, then it will delete all my music (and apps and photos), or else it cannot Sync the music to my device. This has very rarely been an issue, as my main computer (my laptop) has almost always been the one with iTunes on it. I have found iTunes a tad cumbersome as it seems like Apple designed it to purposely perform poorly on Windows systems, but no alternative has ever matched it in terms of UI. I don't get new music on a regular basis, so I very rarely even have to open the damn thing.

 

[Latiken]

If the songs are greyed out in the Music app, that means they were set to be Synced to the device, but never were. At least that's what it's supposed to mean. It never hurts to try a fresh Sync.

If you bought your music from iTunes or any other major online provider, then they have DRM. If not (i.e. you "found" them on the internet), then the songs shouldn't have any sort of protection whatsoever. I am not sure about purchasing physical CDs and ripping the music from them, though. Putting DRM onto physical CDs seems like easily the most pointless and arbitrary act anyone could make. If a pirate wants to upload the songs, they have ways to easily crack or circumvent the DRM. Easily. [I don't really expect the music industry to understand that DRM is pretty much the same thing as the War on Drugs, just on a different scale. Where the War on Drugs introduced hundreds of thousands to drugs they would have otherwise never encountered, DRM'd music doesn't affect people nearly as heavily and only turns a few hundred or thousand otherwise repeat-customers to piracy. But let me hop down off my soapbox and stop pulling numbers out of my ass.]

I, personally, have never had any problems with iTunes and music. I know that if my iPhone or iPad is Synced with another iTunes, then it will delete all my music (and apps and photos), or else it cannot Sync the music to my device. This has very rarely been an issue, as my main computer (my laptop) has almost always been the one with iTunes on it. I have found iTunes a tad cumbersome as it seems like Apple designed it to purposely perform poorly on Windows systems, but no alternative has ever matched it in terms of UI. I don't get new music on a regular basis, so I very rarely even have to open the damn thing.

I actually have to upload a playlist with all my music because the main iTunes library is filled with all my dads music. I will try to resync all my music back on as I completely wiped all my music off my phone.