A reader recently upgraded her iPhone from iPhone 7 to the new iPhone XS Max. All her music was missing on the new iPhone. She had all her music stored on her MacBook and it was also on the iPhone 7. Following the upgrade to the new iPhone XS Max, she found that her music had disappeared from the new iPhone. It didn’t copy over to the new iPhone.
If you ever find yourself in this situation where you need to copy music from your Mac over to your new iPhone or another idevice, it is an easy and straightforward process.
This is primarily for users who don’t use iCloud to sync their data across devices. You will need an USB cable to copy music. Make sure that you are using the same Apple Id across both your MacBook and your new iPhone.
Steps to Copy Music from Mac to iPhone
- Open iTunes on your MacBook
- Connect a USB cable to your iPhone and plug it into your Mac
- Accept ‘Trust Computer’ message and enter iPhone credentials when prompted
- Click the iPhone icon on the left corner
- Now under Settings on the left side, locate Music
- Click ‘Sync Music’
- Click on either ‘Entire music library’ to import all the songs OR
- Choose ‘Selected Playlists, artists…’ to copy specific music
- Click the Apply button on the lower right corner to start copying
- If it doesn’t start, you can click on the ‘Sync’ button to get it going
It will automatically start copying the music over from your Mac to your iPhone. Depending upon how much music you have on your MacBook, it may take some time to copy over all the music.
Although there is a way to copy music over from your Mac iTunes to your new iPhone via Wi-Fi instead of USB, that process can have issues sometimes, if you have a large number of titles that you want to copy over. The USB Cable method is more fail-safe when it comes to copying data over from your MacBook to your iPhone.
You can use this method and steps to copy other media such as your books, photos, ringtones etc from your Mac to your new iPhone.
We hope you were able to easily copy over your music onto your new iPhone. If you have not evaluated iCloud for whatever reason, this might be an opportunity to sign up for iCloud, so that you don’t have to manually copy information between your Apple devices.
Obsessed with tech since the early arrival of A/UX on Apple, Sudz (SK) is responsible for the editorial direction of AppleToolBox. He is based out of Los Angeles, CA.
Sudz specializes in covering all things macOS, having reviewed dozens of OS X and macOS developments over the years.
In a former life, Sudz worked helping Fortune 100 companies with their technology and business transformation aspirations.
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I need to know how to copy SOME of my music to the iPhone, not the many gigs of space ALL my music would consume.
Hi Kevin,
After selecting the Sync music checkbox to turn on syncing of your music to your device, make sure you also check the box under Sync for Selected playlist, artists, albums, and genres.
Then, select the checkbox for the individual items you want to sync and make sure any item you don’t want to sync are not selected.
I have got a MacBook Pro mid 2009, which runs with MacOX Captain. I cannot upgrade to newer versions.
To make matters worse, iTunes does not recognise my new iPhone 11 Pro and I cannot download a software as well.
My music is in both my Mac and my old iPhone but lost in the new one.
I have got iCloud account but has not downloaded my music as well.
Could you please advise?
Hi Pablo,
According to Apple, your iPhone 11 Pro should sync with El Cap!
In the tech specs for the iPhone, it mentions sync support for macOS El Capitan 10.11.6 through macOS Mojave 10.14.6 using iTunes 12.8 or later.
So the first thing is to update your iTunes version to iTunes 12.8 and make sure your Mac runs OS X 10.11.6 (check via Apple Menu > About this Mac)
If you need to update to that version of El Cap, see this support document
Another option is to quit iTunes and re-download it here
I too got my mac in 2009 and I can’t update to iTunes 12.7 as my mac won’t support it. any idea how to get my music to my new iPhone 8S?
Hi Sheila,
Unfortunately, for the iPhone 8/8 Plus running iOS 13, Apple lists the following requirements to sync with a computer:
Syncing to a Mac or a PC requires:
macOS Catalina 10.15 using the Finder
macOS El Capitan 10.11.6 through macOS Mojave 10.14.6 using iTunes 12.8 or later
Windows 7 or later using iTunes 12.9 or later (free download from itunes.com/download)
There are some third-party apps that claim to work, but we don’t have any reliable data on that so we cannot recommend anything.
pls my iPhone was locked and I need to unlock it
pls I need peoples help
#thanks
Hi Ede,
Is your iPhone locked with a device passcode and you can’t remember it or is it locked because of iCloud Activation Lock or problems entering an Apple ID and passcode?