The iTunes app in iOS is just a portal to Apple's media stores for purchasing music, purchasing or renting TV Shows and movies
You really can't get music and photo libraries into an iPad without using the actual iTunes app for a PC or Mac computer.
IPads are still companion, ancilliary devices and you still need a full featured computer.Ī PC or Mac is still needed with an iPad. IPads, and even iPad Pros, are NOT full featured laptop replacements for most users.
I hope this explanation and clarification is helpful to you. Whilst it is “possible” to use an iOS/iPadOS device without ever resorting to needing a PC/Mac, most owners, sooner or later, encounter a situation where access to a PC/Mac becomes necessary. namely they facilitate device “restore” should your iPad or iPhone everr require total reload of their Operating System - or if your device ever becomes disabled due to you forgetting your device passcode. ITunes (and Finder) also serve another critical function. The iTunes App on your device is the gateway to “paid” content from Apple - whereas the Music App serves as your native media player.
Media is managed in the full iTunes Application - and transferred to your device. The full iTunes Application, running on your PC, is you media managment hub - frm which you can import and/or legally “rip” content from physical media that you already own (such as CD). Media management within iOS/iPadOS, due to the DRM controls implemented by Apple, is heavily tied to iTunes - and in the contect of managing an external music/media collection, this will be the full iTunes Application that runs on a PC or Mac (although MacOS Catalina now manages iOS/iPadOS devices via Finder). And generally enjoy the music I’ve spent so long curating. I just want to copy my music to the iPad and see/search for my music, see my album art and music meta data, see my playlists and create new ones. I don’t want to pay extra for iCloud or any other services or apps to play my music. I cannot find a way to import my music into iTunes on the iPad.Ĭan someone point me in the right direction here? I have about 20gb of music (for my 256gb iPad that is a drop in the ocean). So I can see that there is an app called “iTunes” which I’ve signed up for and can see I can pay for music (which I don’t need to do as I already did!).Īpparently I can use a PC to copy my m4a songs into the iPad, but I don’t have a PC (didn’t think I needed one!) and I don’t really want to rely on being able to use my friends PC whenever I want new music on my iPad. But still I get no album/playlist management features. So I got same friend to convert wma to m4a and now I can play them using iOS native player. These didn’t play natively in iOS (although I downloaded VLC and it did play them, but without any album management type stuff) First thing I did was get a friend to format a usb stick and copy my old wma files to it. Now in the iOS world I’m feeling things just got harder (but hoping that’s just my lack of knowledge!). Whilst not amazing the player allowed me to view the albums, set up playlists, shuffle and organise, see meta data etc.
My 10 year old windows 7 laptop finally breathed its last breath and I went for a shiny new “laptop replacement” - iPad Pro 11”ĭuring my 10 years of windows “bliss”, I had used the media player to rip to wma my complete cd collection - 1000s of songs.