How To Copy Music from Your Mac to Your New iPhone

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.

SK( Managing Editor )

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.