iOS/Android Culture Clash: Music Edition
September 1, 2012 8:33 AM   Subscribe

Trying to love Android but struggling to get music from iTunes to Samsung Galaxy S III. Difficulty: preserve playlists.

Recently switched over from an iPhone to an Android device and cannot for the life of me figure out how to get my music onto my new device while preserving playlists. I get that I can just drag and drop files from my computer to my phone in Windows Explorer. The playlists I have carefully curated, however, seem to present a different problem.

First, I upgraded all iTunes songs with DRM so that they no longer have DRM. Then, I transferred them all to DoubleTwist, only to find out that DoubleTwist cannot sync via USB with my device since it is new to the market. (My option is to pay $4.99 to sync wirelessly via AirSync, which seems to be pretty buggy for many users). Admin replies on the DoubleTwist support threads as recent as three days ago indicate that developers are currently debugging a fix for the device I have. But till then, I'm stuck.

So, I uploaded everything to Google Play, which also preserved the playlists. I'm trying to follow the directions here, but when I open the Google Play Music app on my phone, nothing shows up. I get a screen that says "Ways to add music", with options to "Shop", "Upload", or "Copy music from your computer to your device using a USB cable". When I tap the third option it brings me to the Google support page.

So, what gives? I feel like I am missing a really obvious, simple fix here. I want to be an intrepid, do-it-yourself Android user, but this one little thing is enough to make me want to give up my big new glossy screen and go back to iOS.
posted by shortskirtlongjacket to Technology (3 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Wow, and the simple solution turned out to be that I did not have Music checked in my Google account sync settings. Still interested in how to get the actual files with playlist structure onto the device, though.
posted by shortskirtlongjacket at 8:40 AM on September 1, 2012


Best answer: You can export each playlist as an M3U file from iTunes and then copy that file (plus all your music files) to your Android device.
posted by anaelith at 10:19 AM on September 1, 2012 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: Thank you! My Google-Fu is weakening apparently - I knew it had to be something simple like that!
posted by shortskirtlongjacket at 11:13 AM on September 1, 2012 [1 favorite]


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