Sell the iPad Mini and buy a I mean, you will have to use iTunes. Sorry.

The only way to reliably connect a computer to an iDevice is iTunes.

And since the Windows version of iTunes is buggy and there is no Linux version, that computer should be a Mac.

Sadly, itunes. There used to be some linux software that would do this but I’m not sure if it works with the newer devices.

You can either sync your iPad content with iTunes content so each time you connect it to the laptop, music library will be automatically updated. Or you can turn off the sync and then you will need to manually drag and drop audio files to the music list.

I would strongly recommend doing it manually and disabling the auto-update. Formatting the iDevice and transferring everything back over is time-consuming, and often deletes things you don’t want deleted…. but that is how it will be if you leave it on automatic.

Apparently, iOS can’t do incremental backups :/