OS X - Sync my Music folder to my Sansa

May 24, 2011 10:18 PM

How can I sync my Music folder (and other nonmusic stuff) on Mac OS X to my Sansa?

Sansa is using mass storage mode, just shows up as two disks: the internal storage and the SD card.

On Windows, I used two SyncBackSE sets—one for syncing my Music folder, one for Nonmusic (podcasts, recordings, etc. that I don't want mixed in with my music). Pretty much worked great (except for a few strange files from the NON remix album that insisted on copying again every time... never figured that out).

I've tried Synkron, but it's clunky and seemed to be hitting a lot of errors.

What app (or other solution) should I be using?

posted by nrobertson to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Search for "rsyncx", the OS X version of the popular UNIX tool "rsync".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:10 PM on May 24, 2011

I use Synctron to sync music/photos between my Windows laptop and the microsd card in my phone.

I know what you mean when you say it's clunky. But by changing a couple of advanced settings it has worked perfectly for me ever since. If you don't come across anything better I think you should give it another go.
posted by mataboy at 3:47 AM on May 25, 2011

arRsync is a more current GUI frontend for rsync on OS X. It looks like rsyncx hasn't been updated since OS X10.2
posted by WhackyparseThis at 2:30 AM on May 26, 2011

FYI, I ended up just using rsync in a shell script with the .command extension so it automatically launches when opened from Finder or Spotlight.

#! /bin/sh

# sync the Music folder to Sansa microSDHC card

# -v makes it verbose so you can see what files and folders are getting copied or deleted
# -r means recursive, which means it looks in all the subfolders
# -t preserves the timestamp so the file doesn't get copied again next time
# --delete gets rid of files I deleted on my hard drive
# --modify-window=3 is used because of FAT filesystem time inaccuracy
rsync -vrt --delete --modify-window=3 /Users/nat/Music/ /Volumes/SANSASD/Music/

# sync the Nonmusic folder to Sansa microSDHC card
rsync -vrt --delete --modify-window=3 /Users/nat/Nonmusic/ /Volumes/SANSASD/Nonmusic/

echo "Sansa is synced."

Works great. It just has to be launched manually, which isn't bad at all. And don't forget to make it executable.
posted by nrobertson at 12:51 PM on June 11, 2011