How to manually manage music and playlists on iPad/iPhone with iOS 16

Question

How to manually manage music and playlists on iPad/iPhone with iOS 16

Since the change to Windows using 5 apps to put stuff on my iPad/Iphone I have particularly struggled over playlists.

I want to choose what music I have on the devices, but the manually manage function, despite being an option, doesn't seem to work how it used to where I could select just the songs I wanted, the system seems to only want to start adding the entire library (I have far more music on my PC - and even more on back up hard drives - than I want on any of my devices).

When I began using the apps rather than iTunes I couldn't add any of my existing playlists but creating new ones and dragging the tracks from the older playlists worked - on the devices app the playlists appeared so I could tick the box and synchronise.

My playlists don't appear in devices now, so I created a new one, dragged music on to it, but no playlist, artist, album etc. appears in the devices music list for me to synch - I've probably missed something but would be grateful if anyone whose been beta testing has worked out what to do. Thanks in advance.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: IOS26 Music and Playlists

iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 26

Posted on Sep 16, 2025 11:36 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 16, 2025 02:53 PM in response to Denise Woodcock

UPDATE Now I can't do anything with music, although my music is still in the itunes music folder on my PC, there's nothing on the ipad nor in the app on my pc. I tried adding using the app, tried adding by clicking a song and asking to open with apple music, the app is mostly a blank white screen with part of a circle spinning around.

Looking at the Music folder some of my files are stored in that folder but within that folder there's another one called Music and some files are in there, and some are in another folder in the main Windows Music folder called Apple Music (two albums I downloaded in February 2024 when I was still using the original iTunes programme and I thought all my purchased and ripped music was in the itunes Media Music folder as that was always the path and I had set my Apple Music app to save files to that folder.

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