[iBackupTunes] Share or Backup iOS Music.

Earlier this month, the folks at Drahtwerk released iBackupTunes. A handy iPhone app to backup iPhone music library. These are the same folks who earlier brought us the iWebCamera app that turns iPhone into a webcam.

It’s pretty easy to transfer music from iTunes to iPhone. But the reverse? Oh, boy. There’s no simple way to do it. Of course you can try the various free and paid apps available for the PC to copy music, but never before did we have an elegant solution that worked from the iPhone itself.

 The UI of the app is very neat and intuitive. You can share the music over FTP or through the browser. All you need for this is a wireless network. Any device on the network can then access the music. You can also transfer music via iTunes over USB. Read on for our full review of iBackupTunes.

When you first launch the app, you will see a minimal interface with four tabs at the bottom – Songs, Backup, Import & Settings. You will be using these tabs to share songs but not in the same order in which they have been placed.

Backing up music is really simple and works with a simple two step approach.
Step 1: Import

Tap on Add songs to browse through your iPod contents. Tap on the songs you would like to import one by one or just select all at once. Now tap Done to see the list of songs you selected. I did find a small bug here, that creates duplicate entries for songs you tapped more than once.

As soon as you tap on Start Import, the songs will be imported into iBackupTunes ready to be shared. All songs need to be imported first before you can share them or backup. The import was almost instant. Though I selected just a few songs, I must admit the really fast import speeds.
Step 2: Backup

Go to the Backup Tab to choose one of the three ways to Backup music. We tried each of the three methods and they worked perfectly.

Another bug here. Even iTunes Sharing is titled Browser Sharing as you can see for yourself. But hey, it works just fine!

When sharing over through Browser or FTP, an interesting ability I liked is that of playing it in the browser itself or VLC without downloading the song. So, it’s a great way to preview songs on the computer. If you have an FTP client on the 2nd iOS device you can easily transfer songs between two iOS devices.

If you wish to backup via iTunes, you follow the same approach as transferring files to apps like VLC or Air Sharing.

The whole process was very simple as you can see. Except for a bugs I mentioned and occasional App crashes, I think Drahtwerk has done a good job with version 1.0 of iBackupTunes.

The App also packs in a mini player to play the imported songs without going back to iPod. Also supports background playback, though we did not really need this here.

iBackupTunes is priced at $1.99 and can be downloaded here. If you missed having the ability to share iPhone’s songs with other iOS devices or computers, on your iPhone then this is must have for you.