Wifi Sync - Is it possible?

[cyberyaga]

I LOOOOOVE MediaMonkey. Me and My wife can't live without it.

I recently saw that Winamp had a new app for android. And that it does wifi sync. This is the next best thing since sliced bread, it works flawlessly, and the android app is the best media player on the market.

Now... I know MediaMonkey's music engine is pretty much WinAmp with a kick-ass media library on top of it. This I know, because mostly all plug-ins for WinAmp work for MediaMonkey, and the obvious winamp.exe executable in the mediamonkey directory.

My question is: Is there any way to make that WiFi sync plug-in (pmp_wifi.dll) work with MediaMonkey? Or is there something out there that already does this?

Thanks

[pndragon]

I would really love this feature too and would love to know if you intended this request for only Android phones or all supported mobile devices? Reason I ask is that I would love it for my iPhone 4 but given that Apple hasn't done this themselves (its "in the works") I'm not sure how successful this would be for the iPhone. Having said that, I'm still very much interested in this feature too!

[timelezz]

*Kick!

It's becoming rapidly the new trend on mobile phones: Sync-ing your music by Wifi, skipping the USB cable. I believe it's a perfect homecoming, knowing your music will be synced without having to do anything for it. Will MM support this too?

[CarlG]

I wouldn't hold my breath. Wireless syncing on an unrooted Android would require an app on your phone, and I've heard nothing in these forums about the devs having any interest in developing an Android app.

[timelezz]

Thank you for the heads up. Such a shame. Guess I will have to use the internal sync of an Android media player that supports it.

[CarlG]

I think it is rather short-sighted. Android is clearly going to dominate the mobile scene for years to come, and like myself, I think most people will use their mobile phones to play music. We're in a post-iPod world, and my iPod has not seen the light of day in months.

If the MM devs don't want to develop a dedicated app, they should at least form a strategic alliance with the developer of one of the more popular music players, such as PowerAmp (which I use), or MixZing to make them compatible, and have seamless two-way syncing of files, metadata, playlists, ratings, etc.

Android is still in relative infancy, and competitors such as WinAmp and Songbird, have only now created Android apps to sync with their desktop apps. But if the devs don't move quicker, once they realize that they need to branch out of the comfort zone of the Windows desktop to seize the tablet and mobile phone world, they'll find that their competitors have crowded them out of a market they could own if they moved now.

I've installed, and uninstalled, Songbird and WinAmp more than once each in the past few months, trying to like them due to their Android support, but I keep coming back to MediaMonkey. One day, one of the others will be "good enough", and the Android support will more than make up for whatever features they lack over MediaMonkey.

Cheers, Carl.

[jiri]

I can't promise anything yet, but one day there will be MM for Android. Don't ask for more details yet, but I'll definitely let you know more as soon as there is anything to publish here.

Jiri

[cborresen]

I've installed, and uninstalled, Songbird and WinAmp more than once each in the past few months, trying to like them due to their Android support, but I keep coming back to MediaMonkey.

Same. Chalk up another vote for a dedicated MM app for Android with wifi sync. On the other hand, if there is something in the works, I can wait for as long as it takes to make the app lightweight and solid.

[timelezz]

That is exactly what I was talking about. People love to sync their stuff. And syncing through WiFi may be a pivotal argument for choosing another media manager than MM. A strategic alliance would be a great idea, but they could become competitor of MM too.

[Finsternis]

And yet another vote here. Let's face it - MM is for music NUTS. People like me who measure their music collection by the tens of GB. For playing on my PC, MM is perfection. And when you have a collection that big, you live and die by your metadata - play counts, last played dates, ratings, genres, and so on. It's simply impossible to manually build and maintain playlists. Sure, the auto-playlist features are nice for simple stuff like genre and artists or total file size, but I really can barely live without playlists based on other metadata. When I had an iphone, I loved the fact that I could build playlists like "favorite jazz I haven't heard in six months". And because there was true two-way syncing, when I listened to something on the ipod, that got noted and updated in itunes. But I hated Apple and finally have managed to get rid of them - no more ipod or iphone, no more itunes, no more of Apple's bullcrap. MM helped me break my relationship with Apple because it's the only music player I found that can compare to the features in itunes (though it still lacks a few, like the "Classical Music" broswer mode)

The problem is, I almost never listen to music on my PC anymore, so all the auto-playlist features in MM are nearly useless to me. Yeah, if I want to spend enough time I can build some manual playlists. If I want to listen to a specific album or artist I can do it. And I can say "fill my available space with tunes I like" and then just set it to randomly shuffle among all of them. But the "sync with any device" that MM (and every other media play) advertises is NOT an actual sync - it's a DUMP. MM will simply DUMP my files to my android phone. All it really does is copy the files for me - hell, I could do that myself just by dragging and dropping them. Without actual two-way sync of metadata, with no way to let MM on my PC know what I've been listening to on my phone, basically MM is now nothing more than an advanced file manager and organizer. How sad.

I can't tell you how upset I was when I got my new android phone and discovered that metadata syncing was simply not available anywhere unless I chose to use one of the crappy, slow, feature-free music programs on my PC because they also have android players. There is simply no way to use MM on my PC and have play counts and other valuable metadata synced to it. MM just will never know what tunes I listened to today on my phone. In a world where software can do just about anything, it stuns me beyond belief that this simple thing - sending a few dates and play counts back over the cable to my media player - is essentially impossible. It's almost (almost!) enough to make me go back to an Apple product.

Media Monkey devs, you have by far the best media player and organizer for the PC that's available. Why not break some new ground and make an android player that will sync metadata back to MM? You'd have a smash hit! You'd have a killer app! The very few PC player/android player apps out there that sync any data are all incredibly lame and totally useless for my purposes. MediaMonkey - please, please, please make an android player app thats yncs metadata. It doesn't have to be fancy at all. It doesn't need a billion features. I don't give a damn about fancy cover-art cubes or any of that nonsense. I just want to pick a playlist and press "play". Let me do all the playlist organizing and other work on my PC, where it belongs. All the player has to do is play the files and playlists and send the metadata back to MM. It *can't* be that hard.

[Lowlander]

Someone is already working on an Android player: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 19&t=57366

[timelezz]

Something like Isyncr would be cool. It auto-copies files based on iTunes settings.
Maybe some people will want to move from MM to iTunes when watching this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO13XwF71Fs

[timelezz]

Guys, DoubleTwist is already done with music sync on Android. They have their own music application. So for some people their whole set could replace MM! I'm very sorry for MM, but I am going to give it a try. It sounds very very very good. And it works on Windows & Mac!

Review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtLMKdRZ6R8
Website: http://www.doubletwist.com/

[ACraigL]

@timelezz:
Doubletwist was a nogo for me, simply because it could not deal with the fact my iTunes database was on a non-standard local drive (D, not C, for backup/restore convenience). I also think it is not nearly as powerful a management tool as MM and therefore not a suitable replacement. I believe it also has some issues syncing to an external media card.

I also use iSyncr and while I think it is a really great tool, I'm not loving the iTunes dependency. It was a great way to transition from iOS to Android with little interruption, but it is too burdensome to manage frequently changing content (I sync a lot of TV shows and music obtained outside of iTunes). As such, I've once again turned to MM. I'm already finding it more lightweight and faster, but need to tweak a few things to get it just right.

[timelezz]

Currently iTunes, WMP, Winamp, Songbird, DoubleTwist, et cetera have WiFi sync solutions. MM has NOT! And I completely agree that MM must come with a solution. For me it's becoming a pivotal in a decision whether I will keep using MM. And I am even a lifetime GOLD user!

I've taken time this Sunday to assess some of the alternative workarounds to sync over WiFi with MM. These are the options I come up with:

A: Wait for an Android app that syncs with MM <-- Probably takes ages
B: Copy files to a seperate folder + Android WiFi Sync Files <-- This is possible, but not a favorable solution
C: Auto-export M3u's (MM-script) + Android WiFi Sync M3U's <-- Surprisingly, there is no android app that syncs M3U's

I notice at this point that there are TONS of Android apps that support iTunes, and syncs iTunes playlists. Apparently iTunes is more favorable by developers, or has playlists that are easier to address to. Whatever the reason is, iTunes is so much in favor.

At this moment I installed iTunes, and will give it a try. Probably I will not completely abandon MM. Rather I will use MM for tagging, and iTunes for Synchronizing and playing songs. I would be glad that Last.FM plugin will work again too with iTunes. I will keep you updated.