iPhone music apps - playing YOUR music on the move

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I got asked a question today and I knew the best place to go for an answer. Somewhere people love their music. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

All you iPhone :green_apple::iphone: users, how do you play your MP3s and FLACs on your iPhone when you are on the move?

I am not talking Spotify or Apple Music subscriptions. I am talking good old fashioned ripped files just like the old iPod days.

I’m an Android man so it is easy for me. I use Yatse or Symfonium as they understand a good old fashion set of well tagged files on the local device. As well as enabling me to stream from my home music server.

But I started to look for an iPhone user and realised that it ain’t that simple any more. Apple tell her to pay for Apple Music. When she already has a huge ripped music collection she really doesn’t want to do that. She does not want to pay £10pcm to play the same old MP3s she has been playing for years.

Will Apple’s phone app still play music from the phone without subscription?

Or what app do you now use?

Or do I tell her to go to ebay and find an iPod? :grin:

Thanks

(Yes, I understand how Apple Music will upload and match all your albums
 but the point here is not paying for any extra services. We just want a dumb iPod mode)

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You don’t have to pay for anything to put MP3s on your iPhone: Sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod using your computer - Apple Support

The easiest way is to just enable “Sync music onto Foo’s iPhone,” as shown in the support link. This is unrelated to the (paid) “Sync Library” option used to sync Apple Music’s “cloud music library” on all devices. It just syncs whatever local files you’ve added to the Music app (on macOS) or iTunes (on PC).

If you disable “Sync music onto Foo’s iPhone,” you can still drag and drop music files onto your iPhone in Finder to copy them manaully. This is probably possible using iTunes on Windows, too.

The iPhone’s Music app cannot play FLAC, so you’ll need to convert those to ALAC.

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Thanks for confirming that. I saw the support page, but kinda distrusted it until I talked to someone who actually does this for no payment. And it will be from a PC. Apple’s “support” person ran my friend around in circles attempting to just sell her the subscription.

I assume all her music is in a playable format as it is currently sitting on her old phone. Seems the magic transfer thing didn’t move it to her new phone. But there is also likely to be some PEBCAK in here
 :grin:

Was a little surprised at the lack of options in the App Store. I just wanted to go in fully armed with extra knowledge.

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Yes, I do the same as described by Bitmap - no subscription to Apple Music, it works fine. In the settings to the Music / iTunes app on both computer and iPhone, I turn off “show Apple Music” and “show iTunes store”, which further limits the opportunities for Apple Music to try and invade my musical ecosystem.

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<offtopic>

Sorry to hijack the thread, but WOW! Symfonium is exactly what I need! Streaming music from Google Drive (and submitting it to Listenbrainz of course). If I feel strong later I might try to set up something like Jellyfin
 THANKS for mentioning this!

</offtopic>

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<offtopic>

FWIW, I use Sony | Music Center (ex-SongPal) to play my local music files on Android 9.

I don’t use Sony hardware, scrobbling* nor streaming, and I don’t often use it, like once a week for a few minutes.

* But I think scrobbling was working OK with additional Simple Scrobbler (SLS).

Thanks for dropping two other app names, in case that Sony software becomes later unavailable.

</offtopic>

Apparently, there also is a Sony | Music Center iPhone app version, if you want to try something else.

I was asked by a friend long time ago, how to play music or change ringtones like I do on Android.
If I remember correctly, the biggest problem to play music on iPhone (besides the fact that it costs 6 times more), was that you couldn’t just drag and drop your files through USB.
You were forced to install that jerky useless iTunes software.
I told my friend, forget about playing your stuff, there (it was OK, like me he didn’t need it badly).

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Easy.

I load all my mp3s onto my iphone in two steps.

  1. Load them into itunes or now Apple Music (the apps) on my Windows PC. You don’t need a subscription to Apple Music. (more details if you want)
  2. sync the music to your iphone - either over wifi or a usb cable.

Edit: one little nuance is that itunes has its own view on compilations. You can set the itunes compilation when you encode or in Picard or when you load into itunes/apple music.

For playing flac files, there are apps such as

  • flacplayer+ (supports wifi transfer)
  • foobar2000

I haven’t really explored too much as I batch encode everything to mp3 and in the car can you really hear the flac vs mp3 difference??

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It’s not that bad and it syncs over wifi now - fast

it is getting better

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@dpr @riwood @Bitmap - thank you the Apple people. You are so much more useful than Apple Support. I know how clunky iTunes is, but as a tool to load a phone with music it should do the task fine.

As to “iTunes is getting better” - I thought it was now an abandoned product by Apple? Which kinda means it should be better if <Insert any company name here> stops fiddling with it.

@jesus2099 - interesting option. I’ll check it out.

<not-offtopic>

I of course mentioned the luxury us Android users have with this strange thing called CHOICE. So this is very much on topic as it’s my topic. :grin:

@boysmithers I use Yatse as I have an old phone otherwise I would have moved to Symfonium. The developer is excellent and will listen to requests in the forum. (Though he is a developer so don’t ask daft questions). As I am KODI based I love how Yatse works for me. (Paid for it three or four times now to support the dev)

My own personal streaming solution is working well. My home KODI server is packed full of much music. So I just turn on my Wireshark VPN on my phone to connect to home. And play music from there.

When I don’t want to stream, flip an option in Yatse and I play from the local phone instead.

This then Bluetooth connects to the car. No transcoding needed.

My first check was to look for iPhone version of this and was a bit surprised when I realised it could not be done.

This topic also officially allows other people to chime in with alternate options for music without streaming. Listening that does not use up Data on a phone. I almost suggested “go buy an iPod on Ebay”
</not-offtopic>

And the only reason I mentioned FLAC in the post was to cause trouble
 :rofl: :smiling_imp:

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Yes, you are correct. It is being replaced. I meant that the situation is getting better


Apple has

split up the functionality in itunes. Specifically, Apple Music handles the music part, but a seperate application ‘Apple Devices’ syncs data to the phone. So for example, to put flac files to be played by the iphone version of foobar2000, I start ‘Apple devices’, then drag n drop the flac files into foobar2000 just as @jesus2099 wants


Then sync the phone and start the foobar2000 app, there are the flac files in foobar’s folder


There’s a good choice of apps to play music as well as the Apple Music app:

  • foobar2000
  • vlc
  • Flacbox
  • FLAC Player+
  • etc

So times have changed and it’s a lot better than it used to

maybe vlc?
.

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Not really from the Windows direction. Just iTunes. Apple has too much of a focus on the Apple world and forget some people have cheaper computers they also want to sync music from.

I’ll have a good look at foobar2000 on the Apple. Potentially a good option.

Still doesn’t do gapless playback. And had a pretty bad experience trying to get it to work on an Apple TV. Was looking for a solution to play music over an SMB file share and first thing I found was VLC. But it is pretty dumb as I could not get it to “play folder” or similar. All I could get it to do was play one track at a time. Pretty useless really.

I have simple needs. Just want to point at a folder and play the music in it. :slight_smile:

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Yes, just plug USB and copy files without software, no sync.
And just play files, no libraries or stuff.
Like normal devices.

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It will only be useful if you are online (which, let’s be honest, our phones usually are these days), but you might want to consider something like Plex or Emby (services which have iOS apps afaik) for streaming a large library.

Moving files around is always the coolest way :sunglasses: but if you’d like access to a large library while you are on the go those streamers are very useful. Quite user friendly too.

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I was specifically after the no cost non-streaming options. This person has always had music on her phone iPod style and she likes that same old set of music. Also wants to avoid data use and lives in a cave.

Setting up Kodi\Plex\Emby is too much overkill for her. Even suggesting she sorts out her tags will lead to confusion.

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Fair enough, my suggestion is also for others who stumble across this thread. For those people, FWIW, apparently you can use Plex for free on iOS, by using the web interface instead of the app.

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Yep, adding the Plex web interface to a home based VPN and you’re laughing. On Android that same Yatse and Symfonium I mentioned at the start also link in to Plex I believe.

I used to use KODI’s web interface via a VPN before swapping to Yatse. But these all need a level in Geek to setup and good tags on the music. Not really something happening here on this example.

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Simple:

I play my music from my iphone over airplay to:

  • my car stereo via Carplay
  • airport express connected speakers
  • apple TV box to an amp and bigger speakers
  • Some receivers have built-in airplay, like denon. I don’t have one.
  • Some new TVs have built-in airplay

Alternative Apple configs

  • point apple TV box at the itunes library on a PC and then have the apple tv box play the music
  • point itunes on PC to the apple TV box and it will play to the apple TV music. Use the “remote” app on the iphone to control itunes.

(Same works for Apple Music)

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Thanks @dpr. I have a bit of a drift between two items here. Initial question was about just getting her old music across to her new iPhone. Which I think is now solved with the “use iTunes” answer. (Will find out Friday)

Not sure if her old BMW handles carplay - but that is a puzzle for another time. (My 1990s car has Bluetooth due to swapping the audio head unit. Not something possible in a modern car)

The next puzzle is the one you describe with the Apple TV. Bonus side effect of bringing iTunes to life on the PC is it will pass some music to that TV. But she has already made a comment about disliking iTunes.

There are various folders of old music on a hard disk we need to look at one day.
Sorted as files in folders. She wants this on the Apple TV. This is where I was hoping VLC would be better than it was. (VLC is not a solution over SMB)

Don’t think she wants all that music in iTunes. But really that is likely to be the only way to talk to an Apple TV. Ultimately the best option for the Apple kit.

I can see in the longer term just abandoning Apple TVOS and dumping an old laptop next to the HiFi. Then playing music through that using web interface of KODI\Plex\Emby. The Amp is so old it doesn’t even have HDMI.

Or persuade her to be happy with the small collection on the phone and push from phone to Apple TV via Airplay.

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iTunes and Apple Music support 5 devices per account. So the simple migration path is to backup the old iPhone to itunes, then sync iTunes to the new iPhone. To prevent music piracy, you can only pair an iPhone with one instance of itunes/Apple Music. So you’ll need to have the iTunes instance and PC that put the music on the old iPhone available. It you don’t, then this isn’t going to work.
My fix for this is to keep the originals of all my music on a PC. then I can load it into iTunes and sync to the phone.

So your path might be worth looking at these and determining if these are the source of the music on the phone.

My setup for putting music on the iPhone is simple.

  1. My source music is in a hierarchy, I’m in the process of sorting it out - hence my questions to you on yours in another thread.
  2. I bulk encode the entire hierarchy to mp3s with a small sized embedded artwork. (see note below) using cuetools.
  3. I bulk load the mp3 folder hierarchy to itunes (Add folder to library).
  4. I sync the itunes library to the iPhone.

The use of itunes is just to get the music on the phone. I’m not satisfied with it for anything other than this. The other uses are the result of investments made in the past - the airport expresses date back to around 2009 onwards

For playing music on the TV and ‘Hifi’, I’m still looking for a music player. As we’ve discussed in the past I dream of being able to read the artwork and go down tangents like what else did the bass player write? I’ve not found the software player! I do know it is not itunes or Apple Music. It could kodi or something, but I do know I need everything tagged properly and that will be in flac files with metadata from MB via Picard. I’m pretty sure it’s not an AppleTV box. A kodi or plex box is more likely. That’s my future direction


Have to really ask why she wants the AppleTV. She doesn’t like iTunes so why the AppleTV box?? Mine is HD, not 4K. All it really does is make an older non-smart TV able to run the apps like Netflix, BBC iplayers, Amazon etc and all the other streamers. There are lots that do this.
If she wants the AppleTV streaming content, then that’s one reason. As far as I know, kodi and plex don’t support the streaming Apps. My TV has all those streaming service apps inc AppleTV, so I’m covered if I need them, but this is about having a decent music player! As far as I can see if’s not Apple based.

Probably not. Other options are a headphone jack into the BMW or the FM transmitter trick.
I only mention CarPlay as is handy to play from the phone, use handsfree and be able to say “Hey Siri, play Us and Them.” (Obligatory DSOTM reference!) Android has the equivalent to Carplay and my car is now the latest battlefield in the war for dominance


Unless it’s a very special amp, there are always good cheap options on ebay


Overall, There’s no easy answer and as I said, I’d start with where did the music on the iPhone come from
 then you can:

  1. Store the source music in a folder hierarchy. Tagged as much as you want
  2. Bulk load into itunes to push to the iPhone
  3. Play the music in the hierarchy using some non iTunes player.

Note on iTunes and Artwork.
I have found that if you don’t embed the artwork into each mp3 file in a album folder, and only have a folder.jpg then iTunes will ignore the folder.jpg. Instead it will look up the album and use what it thinks is the correct Artwork. It gets this wrong too many times for my liking. If you really care about this(!) then you have to embed it.

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@dpr - your thoughts are exactly where I am at with this person. iTunes as way of moving music around because she already has the iPhone.

The other music on the PC is historic stuff we have dug up from old hard disks and computers. Currently she doesn’t want it on the phone, but does want to rediscover it.

You guys have saved me a lot of time. Now knowing that “Apple Says” are the only options I don’t need to waste time on finding other apps. Get it to work as per Apple or plugin in other boxes.

Haha! I have to be careful with the answer. I think she bought it because “Apple”. Or maybe someone else bought it for her. Personally I look at it and it seems like limited junk to me. But some people like their badges. If I need to add “smart” to a TV I just buy a cheap Amazon stick. (Remember - this is someone who doesn’t do much audio streaming but does do Netflix)

Really the answer for all that other music is a media centre on a PI or old laptop. Trouble is that then means tagging files - which ain’t gonna happen in the near future. So current option is most likely KODI in File Mode. She understands file hierarchy.

The BMW I have not looked at yet - just made me laugh when she said she was having problems playing music in a flash motor that was parked next to my 25 year old motor that plays music fine :joy: (And FYI - I can talk to Yatse, but prefer to select via handset or on the dashboard unit)

The Amp - I think there is sentimental attachment there. It is old and battered and analogue. Even when I redid some cabling and attached her Blu-ray to a different input it confused her. This is someone who doesn’t like change. Which is a challenging part of this task. Slowly integrating something new whilst not scaring her with the technology.

Your overall thoughts are the same place where I am currently. And it is a project that has to be worked on in steps. If I changed it all in one hit it would freak her out. So first was to get the AppleTV to play through the HiFi again. Next will be to transfer that old music between phones - which will give more music to the AppleTV via ApplePlay. Then some kinda media centre for the older music playback through the HiFi.

Just had a thought - is there a web browser on that AppleTV? Or is it as dumb as most TV web browsers? That could maybe operate the web interface of KODI\Plex to dig through the old music. I think I’m gonna use KODI (which I know well) and let her operate that from her phone via the Web Interface to play direct into the amp via a cable. Ignoring the Apple TV.

I am aware of better Amp options. Personally have a Yamaha and enjoy the options for network based control. Running it from my phone is only a minor part. It is integrated into my Home Automation system so hard that everything fires up automatically when I start playing music on KODI. But that is a different tangent and likely fits our other thread more. :grin: :nerd_face: