Just let me manage my music: iOS and iPhone 2023 edition
October 22, 2023 12:07 PM Subscribe
I have an iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB of storage. I have a lot of music. I want something that should be very simple: to copy a lot of music to the phone, without any cloud features or other BS, and to play the music back with – and this is very important – the ability to "scrobble" music to Last.fm.
For some reason, this seems infinitely harder than it should be.
This week I deleted everything from Apple Music on my phone, and Music on my Mac. I then re-loaded a few hundred albums into Music on macOS and tried to sync that to my phone. I've (as far as I can tell) disabled all the sundry "sync my music to the cloud" stuff.
All I want is the media to copy over to my phone + be playable and track listens on Last.fm. Oh, and to be able to use my very nice Apple headphones without fuss, which rules out other media players. (And I'd prefer not to carry yet another device when I have to travel.)
Somehow, the music doesn't actually sync. It shows up in my library but would have to be manually downloaded. WTF.
Is there a reasonably priced app that will allow just copying over files like it's 1999 and has Last.fm support? (Vox is $5 a month or $50 a year, I think. A little pricey for this, but I'd be willing to pay that if it was straightforward. Devs gotta eat.)
Tried: VLC - no Last.fm support on iOS currently, though it seems like I'd be able to just copy music over. Vox - very fiddly, seems to have Last.fm support but managing music involves their cloud service.
The future is stupid. Please help me make it slightly less so.
This week I deleted everything from Apple Music on my phone, and Music on my Mac. I then re-loaded a few hundred albums into Music on macOS and tried to sync that to my phone. I've (as far as I can tell) disabled all the sundry "sync my music to the cloud" stuff.
All I want is the media to copy over to my phone + be playable and track listens on Last.fm. Oh, and to be able to use my very nice Apple headphones without fuss, which rules out other media players. (And I'd prefer not to carry yet another device when I have to travel.)
Somehow, the music doesn't actually sync. It shows up in my library but would have to be manually downloaded. WTF.
Is there a reasonably priced app that will allow just copying over files like it's 1999 and has Last.fm support? (Vox is $5 a month or $50 a year, I think. A little pricey for this, but I'd be willing to pay that if it was straightforward. Devs gotta eat.)
Tried: VLC - no Last.fm support on iOS currently, though it seems like I'd be able to just copy music over. Vox - very fiddly, seems to have Last.fm support but managing music involves their cloud service.
The future is stupid. Please help me make it slightly less so.
This comment lead me to copytrans and I use that for all my file transfers to iPhone now
posted by soelo at 1:43 PM on October 22, 2023
posted by soelo at 1:43 PM on October 22, 2023
Doppler might be a good fit—it has last.fm integration, and you can sync between the Mac app and the phone app.
posted by boisterousBluebird at 5:31 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by boisterousBluebird at 5:31 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
There's a bunch of programs that allow you to copy from your computer to your phone but the one I have experience with is CopyTrans, mentioned by soelo two comments above. Simple learning curve, it just works. It's a whole suite of stuff, some that you have to pay for but the actual copy music from computer to phone is free.
As to scrobbling from your phone...it's been a long time since I've heard anybody mention scrobbling. I have no experience with iphone scrobbling and I'm sure that you've already done a search but take a look at this anyway. Looks like Reddit might have an answer and it looks like there's a bunch of apps as well.
posted by ashbury at 8:21 PM on October 22, 2023
As to scrobbling from your phone...it's been a long time since I've heard anybody mention scrobbling. I have no experience with iphone scrobbling and I'm sure that you've already done a search but take a look at this anyway. Looks like Reddit might have an answer and it looks like there's a bunch of apps as well.
posted by ashbury at 8:21 PM on October 22, 2023
Somehow, the music doesn't actually sync. It shows up in my library but would have to be manually downloaded. WTF.
Some more info about this would be useful. How are you trying to sync? What does the music panel of the sync window in Finder look like? Does that show your chosen music (all of it, or chosen playlists, or whatever) has synced? When you say "it shows up in my library" do you mean on the phone?
I don't use any cloud stuff, and sync certain playlists from Music app on my Mac to my phone, using the Sync window in Finder. The music appears on the phone, in the Music app, and I can play it. This is how it should work.
Re Last.fm - I use the official Last.fm app which requires me to open it, click "Scan", and submit the scrobbles every so often. It can't (afaik) submit each scrobble as the track's played in Music. I'm fine with this.
If you go that route, note that you should do the Scan/submit thing immediately before syncing your phone with your Mac. And then, when the sync has finished, do Scan again and (probably) discard all the scrobbles. It seems to get confused after a sync about what's been played on your phone, on your Mac, and what's already been scrobbled, and this sets it back to a state of "nothing yet played".
If all that sounds like too much of a hassle (understandable!) try different apps with scrobbling built in, like Doppler, or Longplay if you like playing whole albums.
posted by fabius at 5:09 AM on October 23, 2023
Some more info about this would be useful. How are you trying to sync? What does the music panel of the sync window in Finder look like? Does that show your chosen music (all of it, or chosen playlists, or whatever) has synced? When you say "it shows up in my library" do you mean on the phone?
I don't use any cloud stuff, and sync certain playlists from Music app on my Mac to my phone, using the Sync window in Finder. The music appears on the phone, in the Music app, and I can play it. This is how it should work.
Re Last.fm - I use the official Last.fm app which requires me to open it, click "Scan", and submit the scrobbles every so often. It can't (afaik) submit each scrobble as the track's played in Music. I'm fine with this.
If you go that route, note that you should do the Scan/submit thing immediately before syncing your phone with your Mac. And then, when the sync has finished, do Scan again and (probably) discard all the scrobbles. It seems to get confused after a sync about what's been played on your phone, on your Mac, and what's already been scrobbled, and this sets it back to a state of "nothing yet played".
If all that sounds like too much of a hassle (understandable!) try different apps with scrobbling built in, like Doppler, or Longplay if you like playing whole albums.
posted by fabius at 5:09 AM on October 23, 2023
Response by poster: Doppler might be a good fit—it has last.fm integration, and you can sync between the Mac app and the phone app.
Doppler looks very promising, except that it doesn't seem to sync between the macOS app and phone app. It has a separate Doppler Transfer app that you can drag files into. I'm really, really, really hoping to avoid that level of manual fussing.
(I already have iMazing, which can do this. It is, however, far more manual than what I'd really like.)
posted by jzb at 8:28 AM on October 23, 2023
Doppler looks very promising, except that it doesn't seem to sync between the macOS app and phone app. It has a separate Doppler Transfer app that you can drag files into. I'm really, really, really hoping to avoid that level of manual fussing.
(I already have iMazing, which can do this. It is, however, far more manual than what I'd really like.)
posted by jzb at 8:28 AM on October 23, 2023
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It uses your Apple Music/iTunes library for syncing, but offers more powerful tools such as Last.fm scrobbling. $12 isn't necessarily cheap but also not too expensive. I don't have an iOS device on me at the moment, so I can't test it myself, and though they call it a "Pro" version I can't seem to track down a free version for test. Could at least be worth looking into!
posted by Infinite Peaks at 12:57 PM on October 22, 2023 [1 favorite]