Adding music from iPod nano to iPhone

By Jesse Hollington @jhollington ● Friday, June 11, 2010

Q: I’m having difficulty transferring the music from my second-generation iPod nano to my iPhone 3G with the use of a PC. How do I do this so I can still keep the music on the iPod but also have it on my iPhone? iTunes obviously is no help, as it is exclusive for the computer and the specific iPod that I have. Is there a program that can help me do this? Thank you in advance.

- Kate

A: Actually, you can use the same iTunes library to manage the music on both your iPod nano and your iPhone. iTunes will simply see your iPhone as another device right alongside your iPod, and it will have its own sync settings that are specific to the iPhone, so you can choose to manage the content manually on the iPhone while syncing automatically with your iPod nano, or choose to sync different playlists.  Setting this up is no more complicated than simply connecting the iPhone to your computer—iTunes will present a setup assistant and take you through the initial steps of configuring the sync settings for your iPhone. After that you can simply select your iPhone in the “Devices” list in iTunes and configure it in much the same way as your iPod nano.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to sync your iPhone with a different computer, then you will need to transfer the music from either your existing iTunes library on the original computer, or copy it from the iPod nano onto the second computer and import it into iTunes on there. For more information on copying the iTunes library itself, see our article on Transferring your iTunes Library. If you need to copy the music back from your iPod nano instead, see our tutorial on Copying Content from your iPod to your Computer.