Best options for organising and accessing music on iPhone?

Dave!

Hey guys,

I'm (im)patiently waiting for my 32GB 5S to arrive, and in the meantime, when I'm not watching "unboxing" videos , I'm trying to distract myself by researching a bit (having not used an iPhone for a few years) so that I can hit the ground running when the bloody thing finally arrives!

What I'm trying to decide at the moment is what is the best way to organise music, and what is a good workflow that iPhone uses follow. I went for the 32GB because I wanted to err on the side of caution (and if I'm spending 700 quid, I might as well spend 800 ), but others have said that the 16GB is fine because there are plenty of options available relating to cloud storage and the likes.

I'm a bit unfamiliar with some of the Apple products, so I could use a nudge in the right direction here!

Some considerations:
- I have a MacBook Air. However it doesn't have a huge HDD (bout 150GB free I would guess of the top of my head). So if I were to put all my music on the laptop before syncing through iTunes, then I'd have no space left on the computer. I have a 1TB external HD, but it's a bit rubbish to have to copy files back and forth to that if I want to change my music throughout the week.
- I'm with Three and have "unlimited data" (I gather it's not *really* unlimited, but AFAIK it's a pretty generous quota), so am thinking using some service like Spotify or Grooveshark would be a decent option. I use Grooveshark regularly, but it doesn't have a native iOS app AFAIK. Possibly for jailbroken phones.

ehh... any suggestions welcome! Thanks

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

Armonline

Another option, is to use Google music. This works similer to iTunes Match but is free. Google don't have player software for IOS yet, however there are plenty of third party apps that do this (gMusic being one example)

Google Music is not as good as iTunes Match but can be useful to share music across IOS and android devices

Zcott

+1 for iTunes Match. Great service.

Hobbes

Like Capt Morgan I also use iTunes Match. Streams fine over 3G (I'm using Vodafone), although the most common playlists I just download to the phone.

The nice thing about Match is all your old MP3 are matched against existing songs in iTunes. If they exist they give you access to the high definition versions of the songs for as long as match account is active. There is no security checking on the MP3s either.

Dave!

With iTunes Match, do I need to still have all the music on my laptop, or do I just "match" it once and then can delete it?

Armonline

Dave! wrote: »

With iTunes Match, do I need to still have all the music on my laptop, or do I just "match" it once and then can delete it?

After you match, you can delete your local laptop copy and leave in the cloud.

tfitzgerald

There is a small program called iTools that you can download that will let you do a lot with an iPhone there is even a part of it that will let you convert your own music into a ringtone

keith_d99

I would say Spotify .... no need to worry about hard drive space or the need to have a 32gb iphone.
I have a 16gb phone and have 3.5gb free. You can sync playlist for offline listening so you don't have to be streaming over 3G

Dave!

I've been using Spotify for a few days now and have found it quite good in terms of having all the songs I want, and I have had no troubles with connectivity (Three), etc. I've had some frustrations with the app itself though, and the lack of functionality; everything has to be added to a playlist, and there doesn't seem to be a way to view your "queue" or skip between songs on it once you add something to it.

Anywho - tonight I registered for Google Play All Access (30 day free trial, same as Spotify), and so far am really impressed. Being able to add albums to your library and browse/organise music by artist is great. And I'm currently uploading 4000 songs directly from my external harddrive! I'm not sure what the story is with offline availability, which is something you can do with Spotify.

So far so good though. I just have to make sure that Three don't have some hidden charges if you go above a certain quota... Does anyone know? I've got the "all you can eat data" package, or whatever it's called.