I still don’t get this...

My iPhone has music on it. It’s connected to a Mac via USB. Headphones are plugged into the Mac. The phone shows up in iTunes and I can see all of the tracks. But I can't listen to them because they’re all grayed out.

What terrible sin is iTunes protecting me from here?

And before you tell me to plug the damn headphones into the damn iPhone, I was doing that yesterday and my beautiful but delicate iPhone 4 did an R2-D2-style face-plant onto my desk. I don’t need that kind of stress. :)

Plus, I want to control the music through iTunes from my keyboard rather than fumbling with the phone whenever I want to pause a song.

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Update: Our long national nightmare is over.

Comments

[Matt Jacobs on August 5, 2010 at 2:41 PM]

What if you set it to manually control music and playlists? I remember that was always the trick with my iPod.

[Walt Grayson on August 5, 2010 at 2:46 PM]

Yeah, I remember that working... but why is automatic syncing different?

[Marc Nischan on August 16, 2010 at 7:43 AM]

Here's what I do: Plug your iPhone headphones in to the computer, and you can control iTunes from your headphones. I realize this doesn't address your problem exactly, but if you had your iPhone and iTunes synched, you could just keep your iPhone off the battlefield that is your desk. And at the end of the day, isn't it more important to keep the iPhone safe than to allow yourself the indulgence of music :)