iphone and managing (deleting) music when abroad/on another user's laptop

so, i deleted most of my music to make space for photos/videos.

ended up filling my phone so i wanted to delete the rest of my music
connected to friend's laptop/itunes, and couldnt manually manage (delete) music to free up space without sync'ing (which i had caution about, as it seemed like it would blow away everything on my phone - and didnt want to risk it)

for future knowledge, what's the best way to manage files when not connected to my home computer (itunes account)?

sigh, apple .... sigh...

I believe you can turn on "manually manage music and files," or whatever that setting is in iTunes.
Alternatively, you could try other programs that can access iOS. I haven't done this for a while, but last time I tried, PhoneView and PhoneDisk were effective.

milimetersquared said:

I believe you can turn on "manually manage music and files," or whatever that setting is in iTunes.
.

Click to expand...

right - when we tried to apply that, that's when it wanted to sync and mentioned clearing my phone to resync with his laptop -- which is why i stopped right there altogether ..

milimetersquared said:

I believe you can turn on "manually manage music and files," or whatever that setting is in iTunes.
Alternatively, you could try other programs that can access iOS. I haven't done this for a while, but last time I tried, PhoneView and PhoneDisk were effective.

Click to expand...

Toggling that setting will ALWAYS no matter what require you to wipe the sync'd content from the device and copy back the content.

My suggestion is enable manual management and copy iTunes Library.xml and iTunes Libary.itl (no extension on MacOS X) files from the computer your iPhone syncs with to the other machines you also want to sync with. Then any computers you copied this to will be able to manually manage the device, since they will all have the same library id.