Cannot manually manage music and videos without erasing and syncing first

Question

I have an iPhone 3G bought new from the Apple store using 2.1. Using iTunes 8.0 and checking the "Manually manage music and video" checkbox, iTunes prompts me to "Erase and Sync", no other option is available to me. It was the same when using version 7.7 as well.
I'm not syncing to another computer, it's the same MacBook I've had for almost a year. How do I get the Library Persistent ID in iTunes to match the iPhone. I have the ID from the iTunes Music Library.xml file. I just need to know where the matching file for the iPhone is so I can make them match.
The ID doesn't match because I had to rebuild my drive a month ago and my question to Apple (actually Steve) is why can't I sync the other way from the phone to the computer.
Why does my library on the phone have to be wiped out. Who had the warped thought to come up with this genius idea.
Message was edited by: ep1curus

Answer 1

I cannot express how disappointing this was for me to find out.
I want my music to be mobile, I don't want to have to copy it to every computer I want to listen to it on. I want to listen to it from the device, and be able to buy a new album at work or at home. This is a major disappointment for me, as every other device I have owned including my iPod Touch had this capability. I could authorize 5 machines and manually sync, and the music on that device could be played and managed on those authorized machines. For example, my wife has her own music collection, and I have mine, but we have a media center connected to our flat-screen in the living room, that we use for playing music when we are entertaining guests, and with our old iPods and iPod Touch devices, we could unplug one of our devices and plug the other persons in and listen to music from both our libraries without copying the music to that computer, as long as we authorized that machine for the both of us. Now with our iPhones there is no way to keep our seperate librarys and be able to play music on multiple computers in our house and at work, which we have always been able to do until our iPhones. The whole point of the iPhone for me was to be able to combine two devices and now because of the lack of this feature I still have to keep all our iPods around too... Dumb. I almost took our phones back because of this, and if apple doesn't fix it, I probably won't buy another. They should have at least mentioned this little fact before selling the devices to us. I know it's a different device, but it's similar enough that you expect it to work the same as the iPod and iPod Touch. It's not like I am wanting to be able to copy music from the device to multiple machines, it's exactly the opposite... I just want to be able to copy music to the device and listen to it at home and at work... why all apples other devices do this, and the iPhone doesn't is completely perplexing to me, and a serious oversight on there part. This pill would not be so hard to swallow if I had been warned about this prior to dropping almost a grand for iPhones for myself and my wife, expecting what I saw as a more advanced device to work at least as good as the other similar devices I own did.