10/10/19
9:00 am

Sync Your iPhone, iPad or iPod Without iTunes In Catalina

The iTunes app is gone. So how do you sync your iPhone, iPad or iPod? If you are still using a cable or Wi-Fi to sync your devices and not iCloud, you can still do it in macOS Catalina. That functionality has simply mostly moved to the Finder. You can sync music, movies, photos, books and other things this way. Ringtones is tricky, but you can still put custom ringtones on your iPhone. Even older iPods are supported by Catalina.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. So with macOS Catalina you no longer have an iTunes app on your Mac. How do you do an old fashioned sync of your music and other data from your Mac to your iPhone.
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So this was like the number one question I've been asked about the update to Catalina. How can you sync your iPhone from your Mac if you don't have iTunes. Well the answer is pretty simple. All of those functions have been moved from iTunes and are now just available in the Finder. It actually looks pretty much the same and works pretty much the same. You just go to a different place.
So when you first connect to your iPhone the natural thing to do would be to go to iTunes. But iTunes isn't there. Instead you've got the Music app which looks a lot like iTunes. Sure enough if you launch it and your iPhone is connected you'll see it appear on the left under devices just as before. But if you click on it all you're going to get here is a list of things, in this case I have nothing on this iPhone. All you're going to see is maybe some voice memos and some other things. You're not going to see any of the regular settings. There's no tabs up here for syncing or anything. Just a Sync Settings button. Now if you click that you're going to end up in the same place where I'm about to show you. Let me show you the regular way to get there. 
Let's forget about the Music app and go into Finder instead. So we're in Finder and we create a New Finder window. If you look on the left under Locations you should see your phone. So there it is. Now let's make this window a little bit bigger. Now this is going to look very familiar because this is what it looked like in iTunes previous to macOS Catalina. You had these Tabs at the top with General, Music, Movies, etc. You could switch to any of these and the insides of them look just like they did in iTunes. 
So under General here it's going to give you some information about your iPhone or iPad. Check for an update. You can use Restore functions. You've got the same backup buttons here. You can manually backup to your Mac if you want. You've got some other options here at the bottom as well. You can switch to one of these Media Tabs like, for instance, Music. Here you can turn on Sync Music. If I turn that on what it will allow me to do is sync my entire music library just as before or select an artist, album, genres, playlists. It will list those down here so I can check them off. I can switch to Albums, Genres, or Playlists. I can do any combination of those. I can also includes videos or automatically fill free space with songs. These are things we had before in iTunes but now they are in the Finder.
The same is true for the rest of the Media Tabs here. You can set these to sync just as you could before but now you're just doing it in the Finder. After you've made changes to all of these tabs, set it to the way you want, you can hit Apply and it will sync everything to your iPhone or your iPad just as it did before in iTunes.
You also have a Files tab here which is the same as what you had before. It lists all the apps that have file space and you can actually see the files in them. If you want to get a file from it you can actually drag out of here into the desktop and Save that file. You can also add Files in here as well. So, for instance, if I were to open up another Finder window here and I wanted to drag a compatible document to one of these folders I could. You can see how the Plus button is there.
Under Info this is where you sync things like Contacts and Calendars. You turn on syncing for that and you would Apply. Of course this is if you're not using iCloud to sync these things already which is something you definitely should be doing in 2019.
Under Photos you have a lot of options just as before. You've got sync photos to your device from and you can choose a folder or you can do it from the Photos app. If you do it from the Photos app you can select Album, include Only Favorites, do all the things that you did before. Of course if you're using iCloud Photos you wouldn't want to sync with this so you would just have it turned Off.
Now you may not use the old Sync function here to sync your library from the Music app and Movies, and all of that.  What you may actually use is manual syncing. So you can manually manage Music, Movies, and TV shows just as you did before. All you need to do is turn this On and then you Apply. Of course as many of you know if you've used this function before it will remove all of the stuff that you've had if you've previously synced in some way. But once you have Manually Manage on now you can actually go back to the Music app. Now that that is on when you go to Devices here you can actually drag and drop things into here.
So, for instance, let's go back into one of my Library views here. I can take a song and I can drag it. Now you see I can actually add it here into my Device. When I go to it I'll see it's synced there. So this is the same Manually Manage feature we had before. It's just that now you have to enable it in the Finder. Once it's enabled in the Finder you can use it in the Music app to manually move songs to your iPad.
Now you may have noticed that tones or ringtones are missing from here. So you can no longer sync tones from the Music app to the iPhone or iPad. But you see the Music app just doesn't handle ringtones anymore. So it makes sense. However you can still get custom ringtones to your device. So I have that Manually Manage Music, Movies, and TV Shows turned On. Now when I go into the Music app I can drag and drop things in there. I can drag and drop from the Finder. Here I've got a M4R ringtone. I can drag and drop that in. You won't see it appear here but I've observed it appears in your Setting's Sounds list. You'll actually have that ringtone available. You could just do this using iCloud Drive to bring the file over in the GarageBand app on your iPhone or iPad to convert it to a ringtone. You still have the ability to create your own ringtones from just about any audio source.
Now keep in mind for most of us we don't use an old fashioned sync anymore. iCloud takes care of all of this. Use iCloud Photos, iCloud Drive, use iCloud for Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, all of that. It automatically syncs with your phone. New users may not even realize there's a way to sync from a Mac to an iPhone. I all just happens automatically, wirelessly, through the Cloud.
What about iPods. What if you have an old iPod lying around. Well guess what. This works great with those as well. So here I've got a really old 6th generation iPod Nano. One of the little square ones. Almost looks like you can wear it as a watch. It shows up here in the Finder just as the iPhone and iPad do. I've got the ability to sync music, podcasts, audiobooks, and photos and it seems to work just fine. It actually even shows up a second time in the Finder because I believe this had a little function on it where you can store files so you can get to it that way. In the Music app as well it appears there. You can see it and I can see what music is actually on this. If I set it to manual sync I can drag and drop stuff into this iPod. It works fine with this one.
Here's an even older 5th generation iPod Nano. These were great because they actually had this little video camera on the back and you can record 644/80 video with them. Really cool. You can watch videos too. You can see here I've got the ability to sync Music, Movies, TV Shows, and Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Photos. So a great deal there. You can also see directly on the drive itself just like before. In the Music app you can see it appear there as well. I don't have anything on it but I could drag and drop things into it if I had it set to Manual syncing for this little beauty.
You can still pretty much do everything that you need with Catalina using the Finder instead of iTunes.

Comments: 72 Responses to “Sync Your iPhone, iPad or iPod Without iTunes In Catalina”

Barry Young

5 years ago

Sorry Gary but on my version of Catalina, this does not work. If I want to see my iPhone6 or my iPod Air I have to go through Music or Photo's to have them show up. The FINDER does NOT show them in the list as you described.

Comments: 72 Responses to “Sync Your iPhone, iPad or iPod Without iTunes In Catalina”

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