How best to sync music to Android on OSX?

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jpollock

600 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#113542 20-Jan-2013 00:26

I'm wondering how everyone is geting music onto their shiny new Nexus 4's from OSX!

I've got a new Nexus 4, and it doesn't support USB Mass Storage. This means that it doesn't mount as a drive, which means that all of the 3rd party synch applications don't seem to work. (DoubleTwist, The Forgotten Synch, Salling Media Sync)

Google Play doesn't allow music synching in NZ, and that seems to be the "official" way forward.

I'd rather not do OTA synching, it's too unreliable and slow. I gave up waiting for my initial push of media to the device after 6 hours. (Using "The Missing Synch", $30 don't bother).

So, does anyone have anything better than hand-copying files onto the device in small blocks using the Android File Transfer app? BTW: Be careful with Android File Transfer - it's buggy. If you push more than about a GB of data, the connection crashes.

Also, anyone have a way of synching from iCal? After about an hour, I managed to get my contacts pushed up to Google, which then managed to pull them onto the phone. I haven't managed it with iCal yet. :)

Thanks!

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http://blog.jason.pollock.ca

n4

959 posts

Ultimate Geek

#747630 20-Jan-2013 09:11

I use an Android app called iSyncr on Windows, but I believe it has an OSX server too. It is OTA, but works fine after the initial sync. It handles your pictures and videos too.

Samsung Note20 Ultra, on 2degrees

ashnizzle

196 posts

Master Geek

#747752 20-Jan-2013 12:42

yeh that or there is also doubletwist as well.

i really hope with keylime pie that google can fix this for android handsets where you can sync it to your phone.

i know with the new windows phone 8 you can use that as suppose to silly zune

NZtechfreak

4649 posts

Uber Geek

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#747770 20-Jan-2013 13:25

Drag and drop is the best way to 'sync' your music to Android devices (or any device for that matter IMO).

Now is your chance to break free of your captivity to the comfortable prison of iTunes :)

Twitter: @nztechfreak
Blogs: HeadphoNZ.org

jpollock

600 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#747776 20-Jan-2013 13:44

NZtechfreak: Drag and drop is the best way to 'sync' your music to Android devices (or any device for that matter IMO).

Now is your chance to break free of your captivity to the comfortable prison of iTunes :)

I don't have enough space on the phone for my entire collection, so I synch playlists, not albums. That makes it more than a little painful to grab 16GB of data and push it to my phone.

Even worse, the supplied Android File Transfer application has a bad habit of crashing.

So far, I exported the playlist as a m3u8, massaged it with grep/sed and then piped it through a shell script to create a single directory full of softlinks. I then hand-copied those across (because the supplied app isn't a real filesystem), in small 500MB chunks.

Now I need to figure out a way to keep it in sync. If the tool had a command line version, then I could do it all myself.

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http://blog.jason.pollock.ca

jpollock

600 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#747777 20-Jan-2013 13:45

ashnizzle: yeh that or there is also doubletwist as well.

i really hope with keylime pie that google can fix this for android handsets where you can sync it to your phone.

i know with the new windows phone 8 you can use that as suppose to silly zune

DoubleTwist can't do MTP synching on OSX, and OTA is too slow. Although, I might give it a try now that I've got the large move complete.

---
http://blog.jason.pollock.ca

NZtechfreak

4649 posts

Uber Geek

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#747794 20-Jan-2013 14:37

jpollock:
NZtechfreak: Drag and drop is the best way to 'sync' your music to Android devices (or any device for that matter IMO).

Now is your chance to break free of your captivity to the comfortable prison of iTunes :)

I don't have enough space on the phone for my entire collection

Ah, of course. Bloody Google and their lies, clear the reason for that is to force users into the cloud.

I got a SeaGate GoFlex Satellite when I had an iPhone 4S last year, let me have my whole collection available on the go and play FLACs to boot. It's not a bad piece of kit if you have lots of media and a very storage-limited device. I still use it quite a lot. They have an updated 1TB model, the Wireless Plus, due to start shipping Feb 1st.

Twitter: @nztechfreak
Blogs: HeadphoNZ.org