My iTunes library is much larger than the contents of any of my iOS devices. To sync music, I choose the option to sync selected playlists, albums, artists and genres. And I only sync playlists; it’s a lot easier to create playlists for the artists whose music I want to sync than scroll through a list of more than 5,000 albums.
But there’s a lack of information in the iTunes sync screen. When I want to add some new music, and need to cull some older tunes to make room, the only way I can find out what to remove is trial and error. For example, this morning, I wanted to add a playlist with a half-dozen albums from a band I like. I checked the playlist, and clicked Sync, but iTunes then told me that I needed about 300 MB more free space. But the capacity bar at the bottom of the window didn’t tell me I was out of space; it’s not worked well since iTunes 12.
So, I needed to remove some music. In the Playlists list, I can uncheck some playlists that I don’t want to sync any more.
The problem is that, when I uncheck a playlist, I have no idea how much space it takes up. iTunes should display this information to the right of the playlist’s name. For example, the 77 May playlist is 1.6 GB; if I knew how much space it took up, I might remove that one to make room. Instead, I had to uncheck some other playlists, then click Sync, to find if there was enough space.
Apple does need to fix the capacity bar issue; that’s the bar at the bottom of the window that shows how much space is used by different types of media or apps. It no longer updates in real time, and often shows free space that is either much more or much less than what’s really on the device. But the most useful information would be precise sizes of playlists, albums, etc.
But, then, of course, that sync this morning took forever, as is the case these days with iTunes…