Why isn't there a decent music player and pc sync program?

[getlooks]

Why isn't there a decent music player and pc sync program? I have tried Doubletwist and Mixzing, but both are inferior products when compared to itunes. There's a big opportunity for someone to get this right.

 

[zcarman]

Well, your sort of barking up a dead tree here...

Google doesn't make a music program. Done... When you compare Windows Mobile, Apple, and even Palm, they have been designing music apps for ever. Windows Mobile uses an ancient version of Windows Media Player that has forward compatibility to the new WMP for Windows (the newer Win Phone 7 will feature Zune Player instead), Apple of course has the dreaded Itunes player (which it does a good job of organizing, but can be hell on compatibility) and Palm pretty much works around those two to create a 'fake' player that works with WMP and Itunes.

Overall, there are 100 ways to sync music to a phone, and unfortunately, Android does the basic 'Drag and Drop' as it's method of choice. If music was one of the primary reasons you purchased a phone, you should have done the Iphone or waited for WinPhone 7 to hit. Android will get there, but it's going to be a while before a third party app is purchased by Google to carry the load.

 

[hodedofome]

Just use iSyncr for syncing your itunes library and the stock Android player for playing. Works fine for me. Doubletwist sux.

 

[JunBringer]

I don't see why everybody needs to "sync" their music. Drag and drop is very easy.

 

[EarlyMon]

I don't see why everybody needs to "sync" their music. Drag and drop is very easy.

I think that maybe some users like to pick up playlists as well as a default organization of tunes - and maybe to not have to worry about the manual management of things.

Speaking for myself, anything I can do wirelessly, I do. (I've downloaded and installed TuneSync, haven't used it yet - install required a re-login and that wasn't convenient until today.)

That said - I still drag and drop as I use my Evo for a player only infrequently - maybe that matters, I don't really know, either. So far, I've taken to Bluetooth for wireless xfers.

 

[IOWA]

Click the link in my sig for WinAmp sync

 

[RoboMonkey]

I use MediaGo for my playList and podCast (yes I still do podCast the old fashioned way).

 

[tmaxey1]

I must be old because i also dont understand the love affair with "sync". One of the best things about breaking free from the iphone was never having to use itunes again. It would take forever to load and ran everything so slowly. I hated having to put music on my phone. It took forever. It is so easy to just open the device and drag and drop. A new album is added to my phone in seconds. Unplug it and go. Non of that bullcrap itunes would do with syncing my apps, picture, ect. I hated that. And heaven forbid you had to cancel the sync in the middle of the 45minute ordeal. It would wipe everything from your phone.

I dont get it i guess. I hate itunes. For me its as bad as installing AOL on a computer. It slows it down and tries to install a bunch of crap like safari ect to your computer. Then tries to launch by itself all the time. Just terrible. I always thought apple designed a bad slow itunes package for windows pc's just to get back at microsoft for eating their lunch for the last 20 years.

 

[Babbit]

I must be old because i also dont understand the love affair with "sync". One of the best things about breaking free from the iphone was never having to use itunes again. It would take forever to load and ran everything so slowly. I hated having to put music on my phone. It took forever. It is so easy to just open the device and drag and drop. A new album is added to my phone in seconds. Unplug it and go. Non of that bullcrap itunes would do with syncing my apps, picture, ect. I hated that. And heaven forbid you had to cancel the sync in the middle of the 45minute ordeal. It would wipe everything from your phone.

I dont get it i guess. I hate itunes. For me its as bad as installing AOL on a computer. It slows it down and tries to install a bunch of crap like safari ect to your computer. Then tries to launch by itself all the time. Just terrible. I always thought apple designed a bad slow itunes package for windows pc's just to get back at microsoft for eating their lunch for the last 20 years.

I used to have an iPhone 3gs and I now have an iPad and it has never taken me more than 5 minutes to sync except for the first time right after I bought them. Sync takes around 30 seconds, and backing up takes about 5 minutes max. Maybe your computer isn't recognizing the usb 2 connection. Apple backs up only changes you made since the last backup, so unless you wiped out your whole phone, there's no reason it should take that long. I had the16 GNARLED version, so maybe that made a difference.

I use doubletwist to sync right now, and its not any slower or faster than drag and drop or itunes, so I don't see why people don't like doubletwist.

 

[Camslam]

I think that maybe some users like to pick up playlists as well as a default organization of tunes - and maybe to not have to worry about the manual management of things.

Speaking for myself, anything I can do wirelessly, I do. (I've downloaded and installed TuneSync, haven't used it yet - install required a re-login and that wasn't convenient until today.)

That said - I still drag and drop as I use my Evo for a player only infrequently - maybe that matters, I don't really know, either. So far, I've taken to Bluetooth for wireless xfers.

Ding, ding, ding.... We have a winner. With only 16GB of memory available for my use, I need as much organization and utilization as possible. Plus, how many of us actually listen to every song on every album we have. Probably about .00012%, thus playlists become very important and I have found the same frustrations.

Dragging and dropping doesn't work in a way I have found, but if someone knows of a way to transfer the playlists and have a player like Mixzing recognize them, great!

Doubletwist is what I have used to transfer/sync music over to the phone, but I won't use it to play it because if I put it on shuffle, the damn thing plays the same song/songs repeatedly before going through the whole playlist even one time, annoying to say the least!

Right now I'm syncing with Doubletwist which takes FOREVER, and then I play it with Mixzing, but trust me when I tell you there have been plenty of issues regarding recognizing and utilizing playlists up to this point.

I'll be excited if someone does come out with a good quality sync/play program.

 

[EarlyMon]

I dont get it i guess. I hate itunes. For me its as bad as installing AOL on a computer. It slows it down and tries to install a bunch of crap like safari ect to your computer. Then tries to launch by itself all the time. Just terrible. I always thought apple designed a bad slow itunes package for windows pc's just to get back at microsoft for eating their lunch for the last 20 years.

I don't get it either.

I'm on record as liking OS X, QuickTime and iTunes. I had the first iTunes on Windows back in the day. One day last year a guy I trust, he prefers Windows over OS X but like me runs both - started griping about iTunes on Windows. I question him for like 10 seconds, then he shows me.

What they've done to Windows users with that bloated install is totally inexcusable. And it just creates a rift between the two user camps. I contrast that to how the MacBU in Microsoft put out Office for OS X - frankly, I think it's better than office on Windows. Whether I'm right or wrong on that point, I'm right on this one: MS really put their best foot forward for the other camp.

Apple did the opposite. The day I learned that was the day any kindness I felt for them went out the window.

With iTunes under OS X, you don't have to sync a thing - it's really a great, convenient drag and drop app for an iPod - or you can sync things incrementally.

I've no doubt they've extended all sorts of pain to Windows users that OS X users don't suffer.

Once upon a time, you needed QuickTime on Windows. Fanboy or not, you did - it was the most advanced small computer media engine out there with great codec support - exactly why I used to install it on Windows.

And iTunes is nothing more than an XML browser that bridges your music files to the media engine - or to other folders or devices.

This is a newer day. Multimedia in Windows is pretty great now. They could have served you very well by re-doing the hooks and have iTunes be a nice compact XML browser bridging to Windows media software.

Now - they're just acting like bullies. It only hurts the users - it doesn't hurt Microsoft at all.

In my mind, there's a point to this long-winded screed and it's this:

If you're a clever app developer looking for something clever to do for Android, please consider building an XML-browsing type media app for us.

• I believe you'll find you made a desktop version of your app do what's required with some simple config options to look for any USB device and file system points and default to /sdcard for Android.
• I believe you'll find that you can exploit multiple views and more powerful mechanisms for album and song art.
• Please include the ability to read ID0 tags for our friends making FLAC files by conversion.
• Ditto for MPEG tags for ALAC and AAC files.
• If you do build a desktop counterpart, please ensure that it will re-organize an SD card, but with user prompting throughout. Look at it this way - drag and drop already intimidates a lot of average users - so give them a little help with organizing, else they suffer the duplicate-song in Downloads and other-folders syndrome.
• I believe you'll find that XML is happy for Java and Android.
• Include a freakin' equalizer.

Anyway - those are my opinions, thanks to all for the (hopefully not too far) off-topic bandwidth.

 

[LearnIIBurn]

Click the link in my sig for WinAmp sync

Hey thanks so much for the Winamp sync! Dude! You rule! I love Winamp and never even thought about possibly being able to sync it. Bravo homie!

 

[EarlyMon]

Dragging and dropping doesn't work in a way I have found, but if someone knows of a way to transfer the playlists and have a player like Mixzing recognize them, great!

Here's what I do:

1. Create a folder under /sdcard/Music with the same name as my playlist.
2. Go to that playlist in iTunes.
3. Select all songs.
4. Drag to target folder.
5. Playing with Meridian, under its Prefs, I tell it to Organize by Albums.
6. Meridian then thinks I have an album by my playlist name.

Yeah. I know. Arcane.

 

[IOWA]

Here's what I do:

1. Create a folder under /sdcard/Music with the same name as my playlist.
2. Go to that playlist in iTunes.
3. Select all songs.
4. Drag to target folder.
5. Playing with Meridian, under its Prefs, I tell it to Organize by Albums.
6. Meridian then thinks I have an album by my playlist name.

Yeah. I know. Arcane.

I just use Winamp

 

[vgsantiago]

I must be old because i also dont understand the love affair with "sync". One of the best things about breaking free from the iphone was never having to use itunes again. It would take forever to load and ran everything so slowly. I hated having to put music on my phone. It took forever. It is so easy to just open the device and drag and drop. A new album is added to my phone in seconds. Unplug it and go. Non of that bullcrap itunes would do with syncing my apps, picture, ect. I hated that. And heaven forbid you had to cancel the sync in the middle of the 45minute ordeal. It would wipe everything from your phone.

I dont get it i guess. I hate itunes. For me its as bad as installing AOL on a computer. It slows it down and tries to install a bunch of crap like safari ect to your computer. Then tries to launch by itself all the time. Just terrible. I always thought apple designed a bad slow itunes package for windows pc's just to get back at microsoft for eating their lunch for the last 20 years.

Not a fan of Apple, but appreciate the simplicity of being able to create playlists and having them created on my phone automatically. isyncr works perfect. It recognizes if songs already exist on my Evo and skips to the next. First go around takes time but after that it's quick. First did the drag and drop thing but I prefer to have my playlists without to much work.

 

[EarlyMon]

Hey - I use Songbird for some of my other stuff, never noticed the new rev has sync capabilities - some of you may be interested:

Songbird - Welcome

Good for Mac and Win, very flexible it seems.

 

[EarlyMon]

I just use Winamp

As you note in your instructions - not possible for OS X users.

The Songbird approach may be easier - I dunno - maybe check it out, I am after this.

Nevermind - weak - sorry, leapt too soon.

 

[JunBringer]

I'm more of an album guy, so playlists don't really concern me.

 

[getlooks]

Hey - I use Songbird for some of my other stuff, never noticed the new rev has sync capabilities - some of you may be interested:

Songbird - Welcome

Good for Mac and Win, very flexible it seems.

This looks cool. Anyone else try Songbird before?

 

[getlooks]

I'm more of an album guy, so playlists don't really concern me.

Wow...I didn't know you guys still existed.

 

[krelkor]

Still waiting for a foobar2000 plugin that allows for auto transcoding of unsupported formats(FLAC).

foo_dop for ipod is awesome, if only it could be made to work for the evo

 

[Liberation]

I'm hearing this will be available in the Fall and I'm really looking forward to it....

AppleInsider | Google Music planned as iTunes for Android, may kill DoubleTwist

 

[EarlyMon]

Still waiting for a foobar2000 plugin that allows for auto transcoding of unsupported formats(FLAC).

foo_dop for ipod is awesome, if only it could be made to work for the evo

Meridian Media Player supports FLAC and others.

 

[tmaxey1]

Wow...I didn't know you guys still existed.

Yea there are more of us than you may think.

In fact i am not even totally sure what a "Playlist" is. I have a very large music collection and usually decide to listen to a few songs by a certain artist at a time. I often decide what i want to listen to in the middle of the current song. I have never set up a playlist in my life. Is it like i am thinking? Do you set up groups of songs that you want to play in order and just let it play?
I jump around with my song selection way to much. I will go from "In the air tonight" to Metallica's "One" impulsively. I think i have music OCD. A playlist makes me feel controlled by my earlier selections..haha.

 

[krelkor]

Meridian Media Player supports FLAC and others.

very true, the problem is 1/2 the music I have is in FLAC, 1/2 the music is Mp3 V0. Cant remember which is which, so if i select 40 albums to send to the phone it would be nice for the FLACs to be transcoded to V0 on the fly.

I dont really need to have FLAC on the phone, just for my archival purposes.