I want to synchronize my music library on my iMac with my Android mobile phone:
- I want something simple.
- I’d rather use WiFi rather than USB. I don’t really need a cloud service, though.
- I want my songs to be re-encoded. Indeed, my iTunes library is Apple Lossless (when ripped from CD) or high-quality MP3 (when bought on Amazon MP3). I can’t play m4a alac on Android. And I don’t want to waste my phone memory on high lossless songs, since they wil be listen with earphones anyway.
Many products. None of them good.
I’ve spent a couple of hours trying different solutions:
- Lifehacker recommends DoubleTwist. It requires you to plug the mobile with the USB cable (except if you buy DoubleTwist AirSync).
- Easy Phone Tunes is free for one playlist (well, I called that playlist « Android sync ») and works well
- iSyncr at €2.5 (and you have to buy an addon for Wifi). However, it looks well done, as it synchronizes play counts, too.
- Deezer works very well. But the synchronized songs are in Deezer cache, and are inaccessible outside of Deezer.
- Winamp, even if still in beta can synchronize, too. Free (the pro version really brings pro features)
- Android Sync manager
only works with Windows computers
And none of them offer re-encoding.
Solution
So, my final workflow is
- Use Max to reencode my iTunes library to ~/Music/MP3
- Open Winamp for Mac and import this folder
- Open Winamp for Android and start sync
Max can be configured to ont regenerate files if they already exist, but I wish Winamp took care of this step.
