iTunes

Ed has a 13" MacBook Pro and after moving his music over using iTunes, he now has duplicate files and they won't play anything. Leo says what you want to do is import the music and not make a copy of it. That will tell iTunes where to go to access the music. So now, Ed will need to get a dedupe app to remove the duplications. Or you can search for everything that includes "copy 1" and "copy 2" and delete them. Then reimport them without "making a copy" enabled. That will reindex iTunes, pointing to where the files live on your external drive. 

Rob wants to know what he can use now that iTunes is going away. Leo says it isn't going away; it's just being divided into Music, TV, and Photos. The sync is being incorporated into your OS now, which Leo says is the best part of the whole idea. But an alternative is VOX on the Mac. Leo says it's a third-party music player that plays high-resolution music.

Octavio wants to make a switch to iOS, but he wants to know how he can do backup while on the road and not use iTunes? He wants to also backup his Windows machine with the same option. Leo says that if you want a "trust no one cloud backup" then there really isn't going to be a solution. But a local backup is your best bet for that, and that means a NAS (network-attached storage). Leo likes Synology. It'll backup every machine, except Octavio's iPad. Your only option there is to iCloud directly or through iTunes.

Richard is visually impaired and has been listening to an audio book he converted from iTunes. But his phone won't play it. Leo says that audio books usually have an M4B standard to provide for bookmarking, and many audio players don't support it. It also gave him multiple copies of it. How can he bypass iTunes and play it? Leo says Richard could try iBooks. It will not only play audio books, but it can sync. But Richard says iBooks will only support purchased items. Leo says it will.

Jon complains that U2 will start playing when he puts down his phone and gets into the car. It's very annoying. Leo suspects that it's the free U2 album that Apple gave to everyone a few years ago. It's called Songs of Innocence and it's probably in iCloud. Apple created a special tool to delete it, he can get it here. But the larger issue is that when he gets rid of it, his Bluetooth audio in his car will just play something else.

Phil says that people also need to have a real radio in their disaster kits as well, so you can get emergency information in the case of a natural disaster. 

Clyde ripped all his CDs and has the music on his phone, but he doesn't have any backups anymore. How can he back them up from his phone? Leo says that if you backup your mobile phone, your phone backs it up. But Leo wants Clyde to also make a separate, accessible copy of the music from his phone. Connect your phone back to your computer and then let iTunes back it up and add those phones to the iTunes library.  Here's how. There's a third party program called Senuti that can also work. 

Maria wants to know how to back up her recordings on her computer, so she can see them on her phone. Rich says that Dropbox is probably the best option. She can drag it into a folder on her desktop and it will appear on the Dropbox app on her phone. She can also do it with Google Drive or iTunes. If she is fine with paying money, WALTR is a decent alternative.

Patty wants to know about an app called iMazing for transferring her music from her phone to her Mac. But when she tried to use it, she lost all her music from her phone. Leo says Patty should have backed up her iPhone with iTunes before doing it. Anything non-standard can cause problems like this. She could check to see if she has a backup of her music on iCloud.

John wants to know what's a good way to clean up his iTunes and back them up to the cloud. Leo says that iTunes Match is great because users get 256kb aac copies placed in the cloud and they can replace those old MP3s with much better versions. What can he do with all the songs named "Track 1?" Leo says the file name isn't as important as the metadata, and iTunes Match needs to know the metadata of the song to match it, but there are several programs that can replace that "track 1" with the title.