Jesus Shuttlesworth
I Got Game
Aight for all intents and purposes, we hate iTunes. 
But it's not all bad. It does have its pros to go along with its cons.
It used to give me headaches and nightmares, and headaches in my nightmares. That's until I learned how to use it. shyt should come with a manual for real.
Luckily, I got you covered.
Consider this The Official iTunes Manual. Sorry, no pics, ain't nobody got time for that. I may add some later but we'll see. Anyway...
It's time to change how you view iTunes. Whatever you thought of it before, scratch that. iTunes is simply a place to manage your music BEFORE you put it on your phone. That's the key, before.
Think of iTunes as the kitchen and your phone as the dinner table. Your music is the food. You don't put food on the dinner table before you first prepare it in the kitchen. Nor do you prepare food on the dinner table itself.
The first thing you wanna do is tun off the option to manually manage music. That's like preparing food on the dinner table, it will only get messy. Plug in your phone, go into iTunes and disable that by clicking on your device and scrolling to Options. Be aware that this will delete your entire library but once you're done with this tutorial that phrase will never scare you again, trust me.
After that you can disconnect your phone. You won't need it again until the very last step.
Real quick, an explanation of how iTunes works. It is a music manager. You can't really "import" music directly into iTunes. When you add music to iTunes you're basically adding a link to a file somewhere on your computer. If you delete that file, iTunes has no reference point and therefore cannot play or do anything else with that file/song. This is important to know. So what you need to do is set up a folder on your computer designated to being the home of all the music you want on your phone. We'll call this the pantry.
So let's break it down: in order to eat food at the dinner table, you need to prepare the food in the kitchen. And in order to prepare food in the kitchen, you must have food in the pantry.
So all your music is in this designated folder. Simply drag that music into your iTunes library. Not your device library (phone should be unplugged so not to get confused). The top section of the left hand menu is iTunes itself. Drop your music there.
Now remember, the music isn't really in iTunes. In order for that to be the case it would take up twice as much space on your computer. It's just a reference or shortcut to those songs which are actually located in that designated folder. Again, that music must remain in that folder in order to exist in iTunes. Delete a song from the folder, you essentially delete it from iTunes. It will remain on your phone until your next sync, at which point it will copy your iTunes library to your phone. That missing song will then be missing from your phone as well. That's kinda meh, but it's kinda good because it ensures you always have a backup of your library. It FORCES you to back your shyt up.
FYI, music can come from different folders but the same rules apply, they must remain in whatever folder they were in when you dropped them in iTunes. iTunes will look for that specified path for each file. I keep it simple and use 1 folder for my iPhone music, and that's what I recommend, but I just wanted to make that point known.
Anyways, once you have all your music in iTunes, go ahead and manage it as you like. This is one area I think iTunes excels at. You can easily edit album artwork in iTunes. They have an option to "Get Album Artwork" but if you're like me and 97% of your music is downloaded that might not work (never tried it). Instead, right click on the song and select "Get Info". That allows you to manually input whatever info you want from artwork, to artist name, song name, album name, year, genre, etc. But it also gives you the ability to have a song start and/or stop at a certain point. That's a great feature for when you have a song with an interlude at the beginning or end of a song that you don't care to hear.
Once you have all that set up nicely, connect your iPhone and hit sync. Your newly managed library is on your phone with all the artwork and whatever else you wanted. At this point you could go outside, throw your iPhone as far as you can throw it, back over it with your car or give it to a homeless man. Then go get a new iDevice, plug it in and hit sync and your library is right back, unscathed.
I said all that to say this: there is basically 1 extra step when using iTunes and that's hitting sync at the end.
On other platforms, you drag music into Windows Explorer, where managing music is limited. In iOS, you drag music into iTunes, where it is easily manageable. Then you hit sync. That's it.
brehs.
But it's not all bad. It does have its pros to go along with its cons.
It used to give me headaches and nightmares, and headaches in my nightmares. That's until I learned how to use it. shyt should come with a manual for real.
Luckily, I got you covered.
Consider this The Official iTunes Manual. Sorry, no pics, ain't nobody got time for that. I may add some later but we'll see. Anyway...It's time to change how you view iTunes. Whatever you thought of it before, scratch that. iTunes is simply a place to manage your music BEFORE you put it on your phone. That's the key, before.
Think of iTunes as the kitchen and your phone as the dinner table. Your music is the food. You don't put food on the dinner table before you first prepare it in the kitchen. Nor do you prepare food on the dinner table itself.
The first thing you wanna do is tun off the option to manually manage music. That's like preparing food on the dinner table, it will only get messy. Plug in your phone, go into iTunes and disable that by clicking on your device and scrolling to Options. Be aware that this will delete your entire library but once you're done with this tutorial that phrase will never scare you again, trust me.
After that you can disconnect your phone. You won't need it again until the very last step.
Real quick, an explanation of how iTunes works. It is a music manager. You can't really "import" music directly into iTunes. When you add music to iTunes you're basically adding a link to a file somewhere on your computer. If you delete that file, iTunes has no reference point and therefore cannot play or do anything else with that file/song. This is important to know. So what you need to do is set up a folder on your computer designated to being the home of all the music you want on your phone. We'll call this the pantry.
So let's break it down: in order to eat food at the dinner table, you need to prepare the food in the kitchen. And in order to prepare food in the kitchen, you must have food in the pantry.
So all your music is in this designated folder. Simply drag that music into your iTunes library. Not your device library (phone should be unplugged so not to get confused). The top section of the left hand menu is iTunes itself. Drop your music there.
Now remember, the music isn't really in iTunes. In order for that to be the case it would take up twice as much space on your computer. It's just a reference or shortcut to those songs which are actually located in that designated folder. Again, that music must remain in that folder in order to exist in iTunes. Delete a song from the folder, you essentially delete it from iTunes. It will remain on your phone until your next sync, at which point it will copy your iTunes library to your phone. That missing song will then be missing from your phone as well. That's kinda meh, but it's kinda good because it ensures you always have a backup of your library. It FORCES you to back your shyt up.
FYI, music can come from different folders but the same rules apply, they must remain in whatever folder they were in when you dropped them in iTunes. iTunes will look for that specified path for each file. I keep it simple and use 1 folder for my iPhone music, and that's what I recommend, but I just wanted to make that point known.
Anyways, once you have all your music in iTunes, go ahead and manage it as you like. This is one area I think iTunes excels at. You can easily edit album artwork in iTunes. They have an option to "Get Album Artwork" but if you're like me and 97% of your music is downloaded that might not work (never tried it). Instead, right click on the song and select "Get Info". That allows you to manually input whatever info you want from artwork, to artist name, song name, album name, year, genre, etc. But it also gives you the ability to have a song start and/or stop at a certain point. That's a great feature for when you have a song with an interlude at the beginning or end of a song that you don't care to hear.
Once you have all that set up nicely, connect your iPhone and hit sync. Your newly managed library is on your phone with all the artwork and whatever else you wanted. At this point you could go outside, throw your iPhone as far as you can throw it, back over it with your car or give it to a homeless man. Then go get a new iDevice, plug it in and hit sync and your library is right back, unscathed.
I said all that to say this: there is basically 1 extra step when using iTunes and that's hitting sync at the end.
On other platforms, you drag music into Windows Explorer, where managing music is limited. In iOS, you drag music into iTunes, where it is easily manageable. Then you hit sync. That's it.
brehs.
, itunes is just a middleman