Hacker News Reader

Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

So, how does loading music on an Android device usually work? Do you usually have to drag over files to the mounted SD card? That seems awfully archaic to me, I want my neatly organized music library to sync 1:1 without me having to do anything. Also: Is internal and SD storage treated as one big blob of storage or do I have to micromanage? Do I have to split my 40GB music library in half and copy half of it to the internal memory and the other half to the SD card or will whatever syncing applications are available manage that for me?

View on HN

So, how does loading music on an Android device usually work?

Plenty options. My favorite is TuneSync[1] which syncs your iTunes playlists over Cable or Wifi. There's also DoubleTwist (an iTunes clone) and about a dozen other options, some of which let you mount the phone as a filesystem, some specialize in syncing playlists with various apps.

The nice thing about TuneSync is that it can be configured to automatically attempt a sync whenever Wifi is enabled, or at regular intervals. That means in practice it will just sync whenever it comes near the computer. I sometimes quickly adjust my playlists in iTunes before leaving the house - and they sync while I'm already half out the door.

[1] http://highwindsoftware.com/

> I want my neatly organized music library to sync 1:1 without me having to do anything.

I'm longing for an intelligent way to sync. I have just now 200 GB of mp3s (and I'm not alone, nor exceptional, and I still have several hundreds CDs to convert), so syncing 1:1 simply can't work at all until we have terabytes in our portable devices.

iTunes can "automatically fill free space with songs" on iOS. I don't know if it ranks songs based on rating or plays, but I'm in the same situation as you and it's worked well for me.

Smart playlists work quite nicely and as a fallback dragging over files works just as nicely inside applications with music libraries as in the filesystem (maybe even nicer because those applications are tailored to browsing music, also changes to the metadata sync automatically).

I’m luckily still under 64GB (about 39GB, I sync 256kb/s AAC files because I can’t hear the difference) and it looks like my storage needs will grow slower than available SSD storage.

At least I think that’s the case. My music library grew by about 8GB in the last year but 2010 has been an exception. It’s usually around 3GB since about 2000 (I was twelve back then). If my music library continues to grow by 8GB I have until 2013 to get something larger than 64GB. That should be doable.

There are programs to sync Android Devices (such as Double Twist), but I find it much easier to just mount the internal SD on my GalaxyS and drag and drop it. This being said, I hardly ever use my phone for music (since I also have a Zune) so it doesn't bother me much. As far as I know for my GalaxyS there is a partition on the internal storage for the "Internal SD" and the external SD is handled as a different card. Both mount separately and operate interdependently. So you would have to split that 40GB of music between both Internal and External SD cards.

If you use Linux, Banshee music player is one way. Just drag and drop songs or playlists onto the icon for your Android phone in the left menu, similar to how iTunes works iirc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com