Help Syncing music effectively

[lotus49]

I have been struggling (as you may have seen from my comments in other threads) with the issue of syncing music in my Mac's iTunes library to my SGS2.

My music collection is much too large to fit on my phone, so any folder based syncing won't work.

I also don't use playlists (nor do I have any use for them) so syncing based on playlists also won't work.

SyncMate, Salling Media Sync, The Missing Sync and iSyncr all fail on one or both of these criteria.

DoubleTwist, does interface nicely to iTunes and does have a clean UI that allows me to drag and drop albums more or less like iTunes (except you have to wait for the last copying to complete before starting the next). Unfortunately DoubleTwist loses album art whenever it converts m4a/aiff files to mp3 and since most of my music collection is ripped from my own CDs, I end up with hardly any covers in my music player, which I cannot abide. Also, my taste in music is relatively obscure so programs that find album art never work very well on my collection (1 in 3 hit rate if I'm lucky).

Does anyone have any suggestions for something else I can try short of going back to an iPhone? I love my SGS2 but the desktop integration is appalling and it's really starting to frustrate me.

Any help or suggestions would be gratefully received.

 

[daz_2000]

I think I have said this before but surely the easiest option is to create 1 playlist called sync. And then drag all your albums you wish to sync into the playlist and then sync with isyncr. You will then find all your music in the stock music app in order with artwork.

What more do you want?

I sync with isyncr wifi from the comfort of my sofa.

When you want to add more albums to your phone drag to that playlist and then sync.

 

[lotus49]

I think I may have missed that suggestion the last time, sorry if I haven't been paying attention .

That does sound like a workable solution so I'll give that a go. If it does work (and I have no reason to believe that it won't) I'll feed back (and thank your post).

[Follow-up]

Sadly that didn't work. It syncs OK and indeed the album art is copied across. What it doesn't do is convert the music into something that I can actually listen to on my phone, it just copies the files across regardless of whether the format is recognised or not.

It may be that I can find a player that recognises m4a/aiff but Player Pro doesn't :-(.

It looks like I can have music but no album art or album art but no music.

 

[TobesEtc]

Thanks guys - I was going to ask the same question but I'll try this solution, as drag/drop was mashing my album art!

 

[daz_2000]

I think I may have missed that suggestion the last time, sorry if I haven't been paying attention .

That does sound like a workable solution so I'll give that a go. If it does work (and I have no reason to believe that it won't) I'll feed back (and thank your post).

[Follow-up]

Sadly that didn't work. It syncs OK and indeed the album art is copied across. What it doesn't do is convert the music into something that I can actually listen to on my phone, it just copies the files across regardless of whether the format is recognised or not.

It may be that I can find a player that recognises m4a/aiff but Player Pro doesn't :-(.

It looks like I can have music but no album art or album art but no music.

The stock player plays my m4a - I actually like the stock player and isyncr gives it a nice 4 x 2 widget.

I didnt have any aiff files, but downloaded one and it didnt play, think you might be a bit stick with those files im afraid.

Still my solution works ! (sort of)

 

[lotus49]

I think I am starting to get somewhere with this.

I don't know why my first effort at playing m4a files didn't work but I've tried again with a couple of different albums and they seemed to play OK.

I have searched through my music and it appears that I only have 5 albums in aiff format so I could easily convert those.

All I need to do know is work out why all the meta data doesn't copy across and see if I can persuade iSyncr to sync to my /sdcard/Music folder not /sdcard/syncr.

I am at last starting to feel I am groping towards a workable solution. It's been painful and I'm not quite there yet but certainly getting closer.

[Follow-up]

Having copied some more music, I have found that some m4a files play fine and some don't (they all play fine on my Mac obviously). I have yet to establish why but that is a big blow because it does mean that a currently indeterminate number of my large collection of m4a files won't work.

This is the most frustrating thing I have tried to do with a computer or phone for a long time. What a complete and utter pain in the arse!

 

[lotus49]

It appears that some of my m4a files play and some don't because of the codec. The ones that work use AAC but the ones that don't use Apple Lossless.

I am trying to find out on an Apple forum if there is some programmatic way I can find all the Apple Lossless music and convert it into AAC. If I can do that, I shall be most of the way to achieving what I want.

 

[TobesEtc]

Have installed iSyncr and it gets the music there and the album art. For some reason it seems to lose the Artist Name - 1) why is that and how can I recover that info (it is in iTunes).

2) I'd also like to get Apple Lossless to work - but I suspect that Apple block that...so I may have to delete and re-rip my lossless files... What's the best way to do that - in iTunes?

Should I dump iTunes?