iTunes

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.

Kevin is having issues with iTunes. It won't open at all. Leo says it should, and that isn't unusual. Sometimes .dll files get corrupted. Try uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes. Will that delete his music? Leo says no. It'll be safe. But Leo says that iTunes is an app that has never really worked well, and over time, it's gotten more ungainly and difficult to use. It really needs to be stripped down and built from the ground up. Alternatives include Double Twist. Media Monkey.

Charles has a thousand MP3s and he has multiple copies of all the songs, which is annoying. Leo says that in the iTunes settings, he can tell it to manage his music. But since he already has an iTunes folder with duplicates, Leo recommends taking it off his hard drive (to a thumb drive) and then restart iTunes and select the option to let iTunes manage his music. Then he won't have to deal with duplicates. iTunes is a terrible program for syncing music, especially in Windows.

Dale would like to sync his Android phone to iTunes. Leo says he can't, but he can use an app called DoubleTwist, which will read his iTunes library and copy it to his phone. It costs $8.99

Henry has a home theater system running iTunes for playing music and he wants to expand it to other rooms. But since Apple has discontinued the Airport, what can he do? Leo says that the good news is, there's a better way to do it. Apple has released the HomePod for that purpose, but Leo would wait since it's so new and early in its development. He recommends Sonos Connect. He can connect speakers to it, or he can buy Sonos speakers with the built-in connection. Then he can control it by phone or by Amazon Echo.

Stacey made a one letter error setting up her iPod and she can't download any music on it. She went to the Apple store and the Genius punted and said to call Apple Care. Leo says that the music industry insisted on using a single iTunes account authorized to an Apple account. Stacey should be able to authorize the iPod using her Apple account. If she resets the iPod through iTunes, she should be able to set it up as a new device.

Walt has a few hundred CDs and he'd like to rip them, put them on a music server, and then donate them. Leo recommends ripping in a lossless version called FLAC. FLAC is a great because if one needs to re-burn to a CD, they can. If using iTunes, he should use Apple's own lossless codec. Using a Mac that stays on all the time would work, but Leo recommends using a Network Attached Storage device and have that run as the music server. It can also do double duty backing up the network. Leo recommends the Synology brand.