iTunes 'lie' tunes - Tell me the truth!

[vitolanzafame]

Hi all

I have itunes 12.4.1.6 on my mcabook pro retina, with my iphone 5, 16Gb

Like many people with only 16g to play with, I'm constantly running out of space on my iphone. It really does my head in, as I feel I've whittled it down to the bare minimum of photos, apps and music that I am not willing to get rid of.... but something always felt very strange, like i couldn't quite believe that itunes was telling me the truth.

So i downloaded a file explorer for itunes, and it tells me a different picture: itunes tells me I have 5.57G of audio (920 songs) which i believe includes my voicememos and podcasts. The explorer on the other hand tells me I have 4.5G ! this also includes voicememos and podcasts.

Tbh, itunes has becomes more and more baffling and frustrating to use in conjunction with my phone. It tells me for example that my phone contains many voicememos which simply are not there, it has hundreds of greyed out memos and songs, and each time I try and delete a song or voice memo on the phone via itunes, it then automatically starts adding more songs that i don't want. Apparently this autofill feature is impossible to turn off.

Can anyone suggest a way that i can get a true representation of what is going on my phone? Does anyone else feel like the synchronicity between phone and itunes is a huge pile of poo? I'd really love to not have to restore my phone, or other drastic measures like reinstalling stuff....

thanks in advance.

vito

 

[IWT]

Hi Vito

A warm welcome to Mac-Forums.

Some General Comments:

The latest version of iTunes is 12.4.3.1

What you describe is confusing to a lot of people. You are not alone.

Keeping things general: if you are battling with space available, go into Settings > Storage & iCloud Usage > Storage > Manage Storage. Let it populate the details. Now you will see a long list of every app on your device set out with the largest storage down to the smallest.

You are likely to be amazed by the amount of storage some apps take. For example, in my case, under Zinio is 1.7 GB; but click on the app and I find that the app only takes up 25.8 MB. Documents and data make up the rest. You will find this applies to almost every app you have.

Unfortunately, you cannot delete the "Docs and/or Data" stuff in most cases. What you have to do is delete the app and then re-download it. This clears out all the scruff. It can save you many GBs. And if you do this via iTunes, it's quicker & easier than on the iPhone. Either way, it costs nothing but your time.

Even in Safari, you'd be surprised how much space you can save by getting rid of Website Data, Offline Reading List and History.

Now to some Specific Comments:

The autofill feature with respect to music can be turned off. In iTunes, after you clicked on your iPhone; from the list under it, choose Music. This open a window with "Sync Music" at the top. Next down is a selection of options including "Automatically fill free space with songs". Make sure that is UNCHECKED.

As regards the other choices, carefully check/uncheck the boxes regarding Syncing your entire music library or just Selected playlists, albums, artists, genres.

You can also include or exclude Voice Memos and Music Videos.

This is where you get rid of your music, videos, voice memos. You "delete" by checking/unchecking your playlists, songs and all the rest.

Then Click on Sync.

So, to rid yourself of all Voice Memos, for instance, just uncheck the Voice Memos box. Then sync.

Hope this is of some help. Please post back.

By the way, what OS are you running? Maybe your OS is limiting the version of iTunes you can sustain. As I said, 12.4.3.1 is the latest.

Ian