I just bought an iPhone 4 and am psyched about it, but I want to copy music from my iPod Nano onto it and am stuck. Is there a special cable or something I need? How do I copy music from an iPod onto an iPhone?
This is a rather classic question, especially for new iPhone owners, and the the answer is “it depends”. It depends primarily on whether the iPod and iPhone are both syncing off the same iTunes library on the same computer. If they are, then it’s pretty darn easy: sync your iPod to ensure that all the music on the iPod is also on the computer, then when you plug in your iPhone, go to the “Music” tab and pick which albums, artists, playlists or genres you want to have copy onto the phone. Should actually be pretty straightforward.
If the iPod isn’t set up to sync with the iTunes library on the computer you’re going to be using, well, then things get a bit more complicated. The hurdle we’re going to have to overcome is that the iOS mobile devices from Apple (iPod, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPad, iPhone series, etc) are tightly paired to a specific computer to try and minimize illegal music sharing and copying. Which rather breaks down if you have more than one computer, among other situations.
What we’ll need to do is figure out how to sidestep the iTunes protection and copy music off an iPod into an iTunes library that isn’t the one it’s paired with. To do this there are some terrific third-party apps available for both Mac OS X and Windows PC systems. I’ll demonstrate with a Mac, but the concept will be 90% identical.
If you’re on a PC, I recommend you check out iPodCopy ($32, but well worth it) and on the Mac I’m a big fan of Senuti (free, donation encouraged).
When I plug in an iPod that isn’t paired with the current iTunes library, I see this error message:
Not good. Here’s the trick, though: before you answer this dialog box, the iPod seems to be in a weird state, so just let it sit there while you do the rest of the steps. It won’t hurt anything, it won’t suddenly decide it needs to erase the content. It’s good.
Instead, click on Senuti to start it up and you’ll see the slick logo:
A few seconds later it’ll show you the entire contents of the iPod, including playlists:
Did you see that I have 42GB of music on this iPod, over 10,000 songs? Yeah, it’s my main reference iPod for docking to stereos, listening to in the car, etc. That’s a lot of CDs!
What you want to do is select what you want to copy off the iPod. You can just select everything or a small subset. For this test, I’m going to copy the soundtrack to the splendid movie Red Cliff, composed by Taro Iwashiro:
Before I click on the “Transfer” button on the top left, however, it’s worth going to Preferences and making sure that things are configured as I desire. Here’s what I recommend if you want to integrate the newly copied music into your existing iTunes music library on the computer. I’ve highlighted the three sections I recommend you pay particularly close attention to so it matches your expectations:
Now we’re ready to transfer everything. Close the Preferences window then click on the green “transfer” button and almost instantly it beeps, indicating the transfer has completed.
Finally, you can click on the “cancel” button on the iTunes error window, then eject the iPod (or just unplug it). Double-check that the music copied properly. Here I’ll check by searching my iTunes library for “Red Cliff”:
Looks great. Time to plug in the Apple iPhone 4 / 3GS / etc and navigate to the “Music” tab of the iPhone information area in iTunes. Whether by choosing a playlist, a genre, a musician or album title, find the material you want to copy to the iPhone, select it, then click on “Apply” on the lower right:
Once it’s done, eject. Congrats, you just copied music from your iPod to your iPhone!!
HI Dave,
ive just bought a new ipod touch as my old 1 died, my problem is that I have lots of songs on my iphone (uploaded manually cd collection) but I cant transfer them onto my new ipod, ive tried doing it through my mac but don’t really know what im doing PLEASE can you HELP. I will need a step by srep account as im not too cracky with all this technology
Nice sharing! The latest iTunes is much easier to transfer songs from iPod to iPhone now. And I also know the other ways but it’s not for free at all. Some 3rd party software like FonePaw iOS Transfer is a popular data manage tool for iOS devices. You can transfer songs, photos, contacts, messages etc between iOS devices or computer and iOS devices. It’s convenient and it would save your time on managing data on your iOS devices.
Hi, would you mind to add more good tools like copytrans, sharepod, o2tunes. I guess it would be more choice for the public.
Nice info. Or you can use a program called Backuptrans iPhone SMS Backup & Restore to extract, view or print the messages from iTunes. You can google search for more information about it.
Media that was not purchased through the iTunes store can only be transferred back to your computer using a third party application such as diskaid or iexplorer.
The answer is ANDROID. This is insane that you can’t easily copy YOUR music onto any device you want! I left iOS behind a long time ago because of constraints like this.
I’m here because my wife insisted on having an iPhone and now she constantly has shuffle stuff up to iCloud and the iTunes and onto a device. Way harder then it needs to be.
Forget Apple.
When I did it it wouldnt let me click any of my songs. It simply didn’t work! And it only transfered songs that were on my iPhone already.
Not 100% positive, Kristen, but I’m pretty sure its key functionality is copying data *from* the iPod onto your computer. Check with the developer before you buy it? Or get the demo version and test it? Good luck!
Quick question before I purchase this Ipod Copy. I understand it will let me put all the music from my ipod into the itunes library on my new computer. But will it allow me afterward to put music on my ipod again? What I mean to say is that if I purchase new music from itunes can i put it on my ipod or put the music in my library or iphone onto my ipod as well? Or is it just one use, getting that music from my ipod onto my new itunes library? Thanks.
Dave, I recently bought my son and IPOD touch 4G and myself have an iphone 5. I simply want to try and use itunes to sync the ipod so that the music I purchased, both online, and loaded legal cd’s for my iphone 5 can be put added to his ipod. I am having no luck so far, is there any advice you can offer?
This helped me a lot. Thanks a million.
Excellent article. All we want is something reasonable (1 owner, multiple devices. Hey, I can only BE in one location and listen to one DEVICE at a time, huh?) My problem is a little different, as my Iphone 5 will not sync with Itunes 10.2, it just does not show up on the menu anymore, as my Ipod still does. Apple sez “Oh, you HAVE to go to Itunes 11 to use an Iphone5.” Going to Itunes 11.0 just locks up my old, single-core WinXP computer, as it uses 99% of CPU. Chat on the net is to use at least a dual-core computer, as AppleMobileManagement will then use “only” ONE core, leaving the other free. This would be great, but when I put the hard drive into a newer case, WinXP complained, and trying to get a new unlock code came back with the automated reply that I was giving them an “impossible” system number! So I put the hard drive back into the old case, and deleted Itunes 11 and put 10.2 back on so I could at least use the computer. . .