This has probably been asked before so if anyone can point me to a previous answer I’d be grateful. Or if anyone has the time to clear the mist from my eyes, even better.
I will shortly cease to possess an iPhone. I’ve bought an Android phone of my own – too late to tell me that was a mistake and I know there are strong views on both sides of the Apple/Android dividing line. Anyway, I’ve got one and it’s fine except for one thing. I’m struggling to find a way to get my large iTunes collection organised to work well on my new phone.
The collection is too large to put on the phone. One solution to that might be to get a micro-SD card and I may yet do that but I never had one on my iPhone and never felt the need to have one – I just selected a few playlists in iTunes and synced them. I’d ideally like to do the same. I don’t subscribe to a streaming service and don’t want to. I just want to be able to select and play on my phone some of the music I’ve already paid for and have on my PC.
After reading a lot of guidance on t’internet, I tried to sync my iTunes with Google Play on the PC but couldn’t – it just kept freezing after syncing a handful of tracks and I gave up after a couple of days. The issue here may (or may not) be that I have my iTunes library on a separate hard drive because of its size – I don’t have it in the default iTunes library place on my PC. I was unable to get Google Play to let me select subfolders of that folder and sync with them individually – it only ever let me choose to sync all my music – and then froze. I then tried using doubleTwist but found that I either had to transfer ALL of my playlists or all of my library (too big) to the phone. That’s a nuisance as I have a lot of playlists that I’d rather not delete and, in aggregate (after a few deletions), they fill almost all of my phone leaving little space for anything else. And I now find that neither doubleTwist’s nor Google Play’s apps have registered my playlists – so I can only access my music using the songs/artists/albums routes which is far from ideal.
I’ve not been able to find a solution to the problem by searching so I thought I’d see if anyone here can help me…
I couldn’t get my tablet and phone to speak to each other.
Someone suggested changing the passwords.
I changed them to ‘Titanic’.
They immediately started to sync!
(Sorry)
That is brilliantly bad – I’m nicking it
Me too!
I didn’t try with mine. I just drag the individual folders over onto a big SD card. I know enough about iTunes to know it’ll be a royal PITA and not worth the emotional energy. Maybe one of the Media Monkey fans here could help? I use an audio app called Pulsar + which works OK. Not at all the seamless iTunes experience though.
Just had a look, looks like the Media Monkey application on the PC scans and links to your iTunes library (I have it on my PC so I know). If you install the MM phone app you can sync between the phone and PC. I haven’t tried this, but I might now. My curiosity is piqued. You are better off buying MM rather than the free one I think. Anyone?
Paid version allows quite a few useful extra database features and allows more accurate ripping of CDs. Also can generate playlists for you automatically using a host of different selectable criteria.
Offers more advanced searching within the database and the Gold version makes full use of all cores of multicore processors for faster searches, volume levelling and file conversion.
The free version comes with a time-limited mp3 encoder which needs to be replaced after a while. Although you can do this without upgrading, the paid-for versions don’t use an encoder that expires. The free version limits the speed of CD/DVD burning to 4x while the Gold version will burn at up to 48x speed. Both free and paid-for versions have a built-in podcast catcher and tag editor and will manage up to 100,000 music or video files. The Gold version allows several separate collection databases to be created with different display and search criteria.
The Gold Lifetime version gives you free upgrades to all new versions for life. The ordinary Gold license only offers upgrades to the version that’s current when you buy.
Current versions are v4.1.25 on the PC and v1.3.5 for Android. Currently being beta-tested is v5 for PC.
@mike_h In my test phase but I can’t seem to stop it looking at my backup drive so everything is duplicated. I assume you can target it – any immediate thoughts? Also some artwork send to be lost – how do you autofind it? Ideas?
On the File menu, click Add/Rescan Tracks to the Library and make sure only the locations you want MM to search in and the file types you want in your library are selected, in the folder tree at the top and the list of recognised file types in the box below. The options button will also let you select how track properties and tags are interpreted and whether album art is looked for in the album folders, plus a few other things.
When it’s finished building the library, under Options on the Tools menu, which is the main configuration section for MM, click on Library > File Monitor and you can specify on the requester there which parent folders it looks in for new files and whether or not it automatically adds them to the library on startup. I have found that MM very, very occasionally doesn’t add new files when it should and that I need to do a rescan from the File menu, but I’m not currently using the most up-to-date version.
Brilliant thanks
Presumably if you want to keep things separate, you can also just point Media Monkey at your music and ignore iTunes altogether.
Yep.
See above…
You wouldn’t have an SD card with the iPhone because they cannot use them. Forget iTunes, get as large a memory card as you can, load with music files and plug it into phone. I find dragging and dropping stuff with an Android phone to be far easier than syncing with an iPhone which always wanted to do stuff it thought I should rather than what I wanted. You can copy directly from computer without using any music management software. Easy!
Or you can upload to the Google cloud and download as you need to your phone. You have to think differently now.
Don’t give up on itunes to google play. There is a crucial piece of Google Play software called Music Manager – you download it to the pc and set it up to sync with itunes. It will then (slowly) upload your entire itunes library into Play, together with those crucial playlists. It will then add whatever new tracks or playlists get added in itunes to Play. It’s only one way: changes in Play don’t get copied across to itunes. The Android google Play app should then reflect your itunes.
I downloaded the Music Manager software. But that’s what won’t sync with my iTunes library. I can’t work out why. After four or five hours it had synced fewer than 40 tracks. I tried playing with the settings in various ways but couldn’t make any more headway.
Maybe I should try again…
Somewhere deep in iTunes @steve-walsh is a screen that says something like allow other applications to read
The iTunes database. That if not checked will stop the syncing
Thanks very much for the help everyone. I think @moseleymoles may have pointed me towards the light at the end of the tunnel. If that turns out to be an oncoming train I’ll have a try with Music Manager. Songs are currently being picked up from my iTunes library by the Google Play Music Manger at the rate of around 10 a minute – not exactly quick but at least something’s happening now. I’ll pick up a micro-SD card later today.
Progress report: in 8 hours, the Music Manager software claims to have uploaded 10% of my iTunes library. So, with a little luck, I might have it all done by the middle of next week.
Then I just need to get it working on a phone app…
My view is iTunes is dead so I’m looking for a replacement to avoid recapturing everything which Media Monkey seems to do. I’m reluctant to pay for it though. I mean, pay for software? WTF?
I feel your pain re: paying for software, especially to replace software I already own, but I have paid for Swinsian to replace iTunes on my Mac.