Syncing with Apple iPhone without iTunes - and it actually works!

Yesterday I’ve spent like 7 hours trying to upload music and videos to my iPhone. Nice going Apple, you put more effort into making the device impossible to work with, instead of solving known issues. Anyways, I finally did get it working, and it works really, really well. There were actually several methods I found to work, but only this one doesn’t freeze. The software is called IMTOO iPhone Computer Transfer.

Basically, what you do is connect your iPhone via USB and voila - the software sees your phone and automatically creates the music and video directories. There are couple of catches though.

First of all, the software isn’t free - the license costs $30. And although I did buy it, I got a refund for some reason the next morning.

Without the license, you are limited to 10 file transfers at a single time. You can manually add as many files as you like though, so if you don’t mind clicking the “remind me later” button after every action, you’re all set.

The other catch is that you have to create playlists, other than just stack all your media in the music/video folders. This is very important, as I was pissed off trying to get the iPod in the iPhone to work - because it crashed after I uploaded more than 20 songs. The iPod just turned off and took me to the desktop.

Other than that, it works really well.

The other methods I found working was MNPLight and iPhonebrowser.

The first one is a web-based app that is installed on your iPhone, and let’s you access the files on the Phone both through the Safari iPhone browser and your PC. Neat, huh? The bad thing is that when you add a playlist through MNPlight, it overrides your iTunes library (made by iTunes or IMTOO), and replaces it with the playlists you made through MNP. There is no option to combine the two - and that sucks.

The second one is a drag-and-drop file browser of the iPhone. Naturally, I thought that I would be able to find a conveniently placed Music folder, where I could drop all of my mp3’s. Fat chance. See the video where I show you exactly HOW bad Apple wants you to use iTunes to store music.