Can I transfer mp3 files to an iphone via wifi?

January 3, 2011 5:06 PM

Can I transfer mp3 files to an iphone via wifi?

A friend is visiting with his iphone and i'd like to give him some mp3s i have. My home network is made of linux and win machines, we have no usb cable and no itunes installation. We do have wifi and we can set up http and ftp servers; does safari come with a "save as" feature that i can use for this purpose? or do we need an app? Sorry but i am completely iphone-illiterate.

PS: iphone is not jailbroken

posted by 3mendo to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Short answer: No. There is no "save as" or wifi transfers for non-jailbroken iPhones.

What you could do, is your friend can have a DropBox account, copy the files to his account from your computer. Download the DropBox app for his iPhone and listen to the music on it (not in the iPod app). Once your friend gets home, he can copy the files from his DropBox to iTunes and it will sync.
posted by birdherder at 5:18 PM on January 3, 2011

Well, sorta. There's Air Sharing and similar sort of apps. It basically makes the iPhone act as an FTP server. But that won't let you play the music.
posted by chairface at 5:38 PM on January 3, 2011

One of the major goals of iOS is to keep easy things like that from happening, so no, not unless you get really creative.
posted by nosila at 7:07 PM on January 3, 2011

Not a perfect answer, but I would use a cheapo cable (Like this or this), which most ipod/iphone users could find a use for as a spare, and Amarok, which you can use for the transfers from (or, IIRC, to) a linux machine without worrying about itunes.
posted by pompomtom at 7:37 PM on January 3, 2011

If he has any of the "use your iPhone as a USB storage" programs already (i.e., Air Sharing), then you can also connect to that to transfer the files and play them. If not, the DropBox solution mentioned by birdherder is the best way to go, since it's a free app.
posted by brool at 8:41 PM on January 3, 2011

3rding the dropbox...now if only there were a way to directly load them in to itunes from DB...syncing is...soooooooo..........slow........

BoxyTunes is will read mp3s from dropbox and play them in the background and in a list format. Its a kludgy solution but its okay.
posted by Chekhovian at 10:40 PM on January 3, 2011

You can visit the mp3 via HTTP in Safari and it will play it. So you can play the mp3 on the iPhone. And you can transfer it via AirSharing. But you can't play the transferred one. So... yes but no.
posted by chairface at 7:23 AM on January 4, 2011

GoodReader will let you transfer files over USB or WiFi, and can play audio/video files as well.
posted by slothdog at 3:21 PM on January 4, 2011